ShaGgy dogamuffin style
by micah locilento
ECW PRESS ecwpress.com
Copyright © Micah Locilento, 2002 Published by EC...
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ShaGgy dogamuffin style
by micah locilento
ECW PRESS ecwpress.com
Copyright © Micah Locilento, 2002 Published by ECW PRESS 2120 Queen Street East, Suite 200, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4E IE2 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW PRESS. NATIONAL LIBRARY OF CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Locilento, Micah, 1974Shaggy: dogamuffin style ISBN 1-55022-523-5
1. Shaggy (Musician) 2. Reggae musicians — United States — Biography,1i. Title. ML420.S525L82 2oo2 782.421646'092 C2002-902193-6 Acquisition Editor: Erin MacLeod Copy Editor: Mary Williams Design: Dushan Milic Typesetting: Wiesia Kolasinska Production: Erin MacLeod Printing: Transcontinental Front cover photo: Anthony Dixon — London Features This book is set in Bodoni. The publication of Shaggy: Dogamuffin Style has been generously supported by the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program. Canada DISTRIBUTION
CANADA: Jaguar Book Group, 100 Armstrong Avenue, Georgetown, ON L7G 5S4 UNITED STATES: Independent Publishers Group, 814 North Franklin Street, Chicago, Illinois 60610 EUROPE: Turnaround Publisher Services, Unit 3, Olympia Trading Estate, Coburg Road, Wood Green, London N2Z 6T2 AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND: Wakefield Press, 1 The Parade West (Box 2066), Kent Town, South Australia 5071 PRINTED AND BOUND IN CANADA
ECW PRESS ecwpress.com
Livicated to Peanut's Hi-Fi. Still running tings at King & Bathurst.
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Contents Acknowledgments 7 Permissions
9
1 : Dancehall Don at the Top of the Pops 13 2
:
Reggae inna Dancehall Style 29
3 : Dancehall Culture 41 4 : Version Galore 49 5 : Under Mi Sleng Teng 71 : 6:Jamaicansin New York 79 7 : Semper Fidelis! 97 8: : Babylon Homework 107 9:: Pure Pleasure 117 10: : Mr. Fantastic 133 11:
Midnite Loser 143
12: : Dog Nuh Dead 153 13 : Reggae Ambassador 165 Notes 172 Index 183
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Acknowledgments Special thanks to everyone at ECW Press, Dave Kingston and Beth Lesser, Dave Brown, Roger Steffens, Pablo Sato, Elena Oumano, rudegal.com, Karen Francis. . . . And especially my partner, Erin MacLeod, whose hard work, patience, and understanding made this book possible.
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Permissions Diligent efforts have been made to contact copyright holders where necessary; please excuse any inadvertent errors or omissions. If anyone has been overlooked, the publisher would be pleased to receive notification and to make any necessary acknowledgments in future printings. Excerpts from "Shaggy Shines on 3rd Set; Virgin Artist Aims to Rule Reggae," Billboard, August 2, 1997, by Elena Oumano. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved. Excerpts from "Shaggy: Still a Hotshot," by Rudegal from http:// www.rudegal.com/shaginOI.htm. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Excerpts from interviews with Dave Kingston, Beth Lesser, Roger Steffens, Pablo Sato, and Karen Francis reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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^-rfrif^l£*D • C^L^M. —•—•
1
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^ a n c e h a l l Don at the Top of the Pops
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As I walked through the dimly lit corridors of Montreal's Molson Center, I had no idea what to expect. It was a warm evening in late September, and music lovers of all ages and all walks of life had crammed into Montreal's premier concert venue to see the man who had conquered the music world in 2001, mesmerizing longtime fans and casual listeners alike with his booty-moving blend of Jamaican dancehall reggae, American R&B, and oldtime rock and roll. Shaggy had been barely edged out by southern California's Linkin Park — with their hard-rocking debut album, Hybrid Theory — as the Recording Industry Association of America's best-selling artist for 2001. The Grammy Award winner's fifth album, Hotshot, sold more than seven million copies in the U.S. alone during the year of its release; total world sales soared over ten million.' So it came as no surprise that legions of fans had come out to see Mr. Lover Lover in person. After all, who could resist? Described by reggae journalist Chuck Foster as "disarmingly soft-spoken for someone who made his mark as a gravel-voiced shouter,"" the man born Orville Richard Burrell is anything but
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shaggy: d o g a m u f f i n style
delicate when on the mike. "Shaggy is egotistic, flamboyant, funny, cocky," he told Simon Button of the Sunday Express, as if describing an alter ego over which he maintains only partial control. "He's the guy in a room full of people who's dressed in bright colors, making a lot of noise. He's the guy that everyone gravitates towards, not the normal guy [who] sat there quietly in the corner."3 As anybody who's seen Shaggy perform live will happily attest, he's the opposite of quiet — and more than a haircut and a costume change short of normal. That night at the Molson Center, a trio of female dancers, three backup singers, and a four-piece band joined him onstage. He whipped the crowd into a frenzy excitedly thrusting his pelvis to the beat, kicking his feet in the air in an exaggerated kung-fu style, and bending his entire body backwards as if sliding under an imaginary limbo pole. All this as he delivered a seemingly endless string of hits in his characteristically relentless flow of deep Jamaican patois. First there was "Luv Me, Luv Me," the top-five hit originally released with guest vocals by Janet Jackson on the soundtrack to the film How Stella Got Her Groove Back. Then there was "Angel," Shaggy's chart-topping version of the 1968 classic "Angel of the Morning," which somehow manages to make use of samples from both Juice Newton's 1981 cover and Steve Miller's "The Joker." Naturally, this one went out to all the "little angels in the crowd." And, of course, we were treated to a performance of the infectious "It Wasn't Me," the song solely responsible for rescuing Hotshot from CD bargain bins around the world and propelling it onto Billboard's chart of top two hundred albums, a spot it held for a
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D a n c e h a l l Don at the Top of the P o p s
spectacular six weeks. To top things off, Shaggy dug deep into his bag of hits, dusting off his 1993 take on "Oh Carolina," one of the biggest hit singles in reggae history. Originally voiced by the Folkes Brothers for producer and soundsystem operator Prince Buster in 1959, "Oh Carolina" is widely recognized as the first-ever reggae recording. As Foster explains in Roots Rock Reggae, "'Oh Carolina' is the earliest known Jamaican record to meld pop singing with Nyahbingi drumming, provided on the original by the legendary Count Ossie and the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari. It is this style of drumming that formed reggae's basic structure: to this day the bass and drum syncopation take their cues from the funde, repeater and big bass drum of the Nyahbingi arrangements." Given reggae's historic failure to cross over to the pop charts — the legendary Bob Marley, for all of his commercial success, never managed a Top 40 single — Shaggy's 1993 version of one of the most important tunes in the history of Jamaican music seemed an unlikely candidate to break down the remaining barriers that had long kept reggae from achieving widespread popular recognition. If any one song screams "Reggae!" it's "Oh Carolina." And, judging by the chorus of frenzied, shrill, adulating voices surrounding me at the Molson Center that night, it seemed clear that through Shaggy reggae's time had finally come. As I listened to the shrieks of approval and watched Shaggy bounce, gyrate, and thrust his pelvis to the beat of what London's Guardian called his "glorious rogering riddims,"" I wondered how many of the fifteen thousand or so Shaggy lovers around me realized that the spectacle before us was something
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shaggy: d o g a m u f f i n style
entirely different. Shaggy's certainly not the first performer to use sex to sell records — his hyper-speed pelvic thrusts could only make me think of Elvis, the original pelvis, who had shocked the world with his comparatively tame waistline wiggling decades earlier. But Shaggy's act was a unique spectacle, when compared to everything else on the pop charts, in just about every other way. For one thing, the music that had bodies shaking, heads bopping, and voices screaming for more and more wasn't pop music at all. It was reggae. Or at least a slick new hybrid of reggae that had ingeniously taken elements of pop, rock, soul, and R&B and combined them with roots reggae's orphan son, the dancehall style (largely foreign to American ears) that has dominated Jamaican music since the early 19803. Amazingly, it seemed that Shaggy had managed to enter the orbit of international pop stardom aboard this most unlikely musical vehicle. But how many of his adoring fans realized that their hero was actually a reggae performer? Suspecting that reggae — with the exception of Bob Marley's music — was new to the vast majority of his Molson Center audience, Shaggy, a self-described reggae "ambassador," never passed up an opportunity to remind us that the tunes we were loving and the spectacle he was putting on were strictly reggae — in what's been called his "dogamuffin" style. "Do you know about reggae?" he shouted between songs. "This music — Shaggy's music — is reggae music." While Shaggy's description of his unique take on his native country's rich musical tradition is more subtle and refined in interviews, he remains adamant about one thing: "I'm a reggae artist first and foremost," he repeatedly insists. Even though he blends elements of other
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D a n c e h a l l Don at the Top of the Pops
styles into his dancehall groove, the reggae influences in Shaggy's music are still dominant. "Reggae is like a plague," he explained to the Denver Westward's Joshua Green. "If you have rock music and you put a reggae piano going straight through it, then it's not rock anymore — it just becomes reggae. If you have hip-hop beats and guys talking Jamaican patois, then it's not rap music anymore — it's reggae music. That's how strong the music is. Whatever element of reggae that you put in a particular song, it just becomes reggae.'" Still, Shaggy is quick to concede that he's not the type of roots reggae performer most of us have come to associate with the music due to the international exposure gained by the likes of Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer, Black Uhuru, Jimmy Cliff, and Burning Spear. Still, many of reggae's most militant purists have gradually come to accept him as a legitimate member of the reggae family. "Reggae is a culture," Shaggy told the New York Times, "it's easy, laid-back. But the dancehall version that I do is more danceable, edgier, and I fuse it with other genres. You can't get bored listening to it. Bob Marley? You can't top that. That's not me. I perform a new, young, hipper version of reggae." For all the effort that Shaggy puts into promoting himself as a reggae artist and spreading the word about reggae, a quick survey of newspaper, magazine, and Internet articles on Shaggy reveals that this pop chart champion is almost universally misunderstood. Having come to know reggae through either Bob Marley or short-lived hit singles such as Maxi Priest's "Close to You," UB4o's "Red Red Wine," Shabba Ranks's "Mr. Loverman," Snow's "Informer," Ini Kamoze's "Here Comes the Hotstepper,"
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shaggy: d o g a m u f f i n style
and a handful of others, it's clear that most pop music writers don't know enough about reggae — especially the raggamuffin, dancehall style that Shaggy plays with — to explain much about his music. Commonly referring to Shaggy as a "reggae rapper" or a "singer" and grouping him with roots reggae legends like Bob Marley in a misinformed effort to illuminate the musical context from which he comes, most say little if anything about his roots in New York's "underground" dancehall scene. Yet it is this dancehall scene that gave Shaggy his first New York hits, "Mampie" and "Big Up," both hard-edged
dancehall
tracks. The dancehall is also the source from which Shaggy draws his "unique" vocal style. It's called chatting, toasting, or — more recently — Mcing. Elements of his performance, in particular the Mr. Boombastic Lover persona, can be traced back to the exaggerated and flamboyant personalities projected by both contemporary and old-time dancehall performers. Even the custom of remaking (referred to in the Jamaican music industry as "versioning") popular songs in an effort to revive old favorites — a formula that Shaggy has successfully applied to both reggae and pop music throughout his career — is a tradition nearly as old as the dancehall itself. Almost everything about Shaggy, in fact, is rooted in the vibrant culture of the dancehall, a culture that's been the driving force behind just about every development in reggae music over the past half century, beginning in Jamaica and spreading throughout the world. So why has Shaggy — often seen as an American "rapper," in spite of his proud Jamaican heritage — been so universally misunderstood? Well, in a sense he hasn't been misunderstood at
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D a n c e h a l l Don at the Top of the Pops
all. While most of Shaggy's chart-topping tunes — including smash hits "Oh Carolina" and "It Wasn't Me" — owe an obvious debt to reggae and dancehall music, Shaggy's record label, MCA, has shied away from promoting him as a reggae artist. According to Roger Steffens, chair of the Grammy reggae screening committee, MCA elected not to submit Shaggy's historic album Hotshot for consideration in the reggae field in 2001, opting to enter it in pop categories instead. In fact, Steffens claims, "had Shaggy's album been submitted for the reggae category last year, we would have rejected it." Still, Shaggy thinks of himself as "a reggae artist first and foremost," quickly qualifying his remark to the Express Post's Jeremy Novick by pointing out, "I don't do reggae like Bob Marley."7 To Geoff Boucher of the Los Angeles Times, Shaggy explained: "My thing is to get people out of the stigma of what a reggae artist should be like . . . No, I don't have dreads. No, I don't smoke weed. And no, I don't make the same kind of music as Bob Marley. But at the end of the day, I'm a reggae artist. . . No disrespect: Bob Marley was a genius. But the difference between him and Shaggy is night and day." "All I really wanted was to sell over a million copies," Shaggy admitted to Boucher, drawing attention to yet another vast difference between himself and Bob Marley. As Steffens (the world's premier Marley expert) explains, Marley "wanted to sell records" too, but Marley's "dearest career wish" was "breaking through to the black American audience." "Did I expect this?" Shaggy continued in his Los Angeles Times interview, speaking of his massive success. "No. I don't think anyone did. I think the reason is I've found a way to bridge the
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shaggy: d o g a m u f f i n style
gap to reggae. You can't just take this music from Jamaica and drop it in people's lap and expect them to eat it up. You have to meet them halfway, so I blended [it]. All I'm doing is fusion and keeping that reggae element in there." While there's no denying that Shaggy's raspy toasting on tracks like "It Wasn't Me" and "Luv Me, Luv Me" is strictly reggae, it's also clear that his label doesn't want to see their artist segregated into the music industry's reggae ghetto — this would damage his sales potential. If anything, Shaggy's desire to be considered for a Grammy in the pop category, his recent tour with the Backstreet Boys, and his contribution of the tune "Shaggy, Where Are You?" to the soundtrack for the 20O2 summer blockbuster movie Scooby Doo are all part of a concerted effort to attract a greater following in the pop world. "My thing is to do a whole album that caters to people of all walks of life," Shaggy explained to Billboard magazine's Elena Oumano while working on Midnite Lover in 1997 — "including people who aren't necessarily reggae lovers, but I will transform into reggae lovers."9 Shaggy also reflected on his push to attract a varied audience in his interview with Geoff Boucher. "I wrote [Hotshot] with the kids in mind . . . The buying public right now are the kids, and it's amazing. That's why [I] have such success on MTV. In composing this record, I basically looked at subject matters to write about that kids would be involved in. A lot of what was going on in radio were things that I was not happy with. A lot of the artists [were] talking about 'bling bling,' the car to drive, the jewelry they wear, which to me was not sending a very good message at all ... I wanted to come with something that was unique. And
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when I look at the kids . . . the kids are either into the Internet right now, video games, or boyfriend and girlfriend. And that's the oldest story in the book." Although Shaggy is certainly not the first reggae act to sing about love, he's definitely one of the most successful. As he's fond of pointing out, forty years of Jamaican music had, until recently, produced only one massive commercial success: Bob Marley. Now there are two. "It's such a unique art form," Shaggy told Elena Oumano, speculating about why his happy reggae vibe has taken the pop world by storm. "I think all music is a birth child of reggae. Its origins are the drum and bass . . . The drum originated from Africa, and, at the end of the day, we're all African descendants . . . We created a sound in Jamaica which transformed from mento (a kind of Jamaican folk music) to ska to rock steady straight down to now. I'm just taking a different progression. I have my own style, and I'm making my own mark. All my songs are reggae, but Shaggy's music must be a signature sound." Certainly, there's no denying that Shaggy has a "signature sound." But, in trying to build a bridge between the pop-buying public and a tiny island nation with an almost unparalleled wealth of musical talent, has Shaggy somehow strayed too far from his roots? Has he actually succeeded in taking reggae to millions of new ears, or has his music been so radically adapted for the market that it no longer qualifies as reggae? I put the question to Roger Steffens, the Grammy reggae screening committee chair, world-renowned Bob Marley expert, owner of the
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shaggy: d o g a m u f f i n style
largest collection of reggae memorabilia in the world, and reggae historian. "Whatever is going on with Shaggy and many of the newer artists," he responded, "it certainly isn't reggae, except in the most far-stretched definition. These days, I don't know what the heck reggae is anymore. Dancehall has basically taken over, and when I was in Jamaica last year, the radio was filled with hip-hop-style Jamaican music, which is a far cry from The Melodians and The Techniques and Slim Smith and Cornell Campbell — and Bob Marley." Still, Steffens added, making clear that he's not in any way criticizing what Shaggy is doing, "Whatever sells records for Shaggy he should continue with, although I don't think sex on the bathroom floor has much to do with righteous reggae music. Apples and oranges. I like the fact that most Americans think of Shaggy as a reggae artist, and if this has the ripple effect of making them listen to other talented Jamaicans, bless him for helping make that connection." Unfortunately, the connection between Shaggy and so many other talented Jamaicans hasn't been made often enough. Fans in the United Kingdom and Japan have carried on a love affair with Jamaican music that goes back to the ska era of the 19608, when the likes of Desmond Dekker, with his influential and often-covered hit "The Israelites," won international attention. America, however, has remained in the dark. Although Bob Marley's Legend has been certified ten times platinum (that's ten million copies sold) by the Recording Industry of America, most U.S. music consumers haven't strayed far from this shiny roots reggae path. Turning on and tuning in to Bob Marley and similar international roots acts in the 19703, these
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D a n c e h a l l Don at t h e Top of the Pops
record-buying Americans dropped out of the craze just as suddenly; when Marley passed away in 1981, it was almost as if reggae died with him. Gaining such widespread popularity, the great Tuff Gong had, for many, come to embody the totality of a musical genre: Bob Marley was reggae. And if reggae in America wasn't officially laid to rest with Marley, then it was frozen in time, overshadowed by its own exotic image. Once it became the protest music of choice for white American college kids, reggae seemed permanently constrained by its romantic associations with ganja, Rastafari, and the politics of "youthful idealism." Since this narrow definition of reggae continues to rule the popular imagination in much of the United States, Shaggy has had very few universal touchstones to call upon in promoting his music. While he may have most in common with late-ragga-era deejays like Shabba Ranks and Buju Banton, as well as early digital dancehall stars Lieutenant Stitchie, Admiral Bailey, and Chaka Demus, the style comparisons are always with Bob Marley — the only other reggae performer to have reached so many listeners. The result, as countless interviews with Shaggy show, is that Shaggy's status as a dancehall reggae deejay is either partially elaborated or entirely ignored. As the article by Jeremy Novick of the Express Post reveals, Shaggy is keen to tell interviewers that "I don't do reggae like Bob Marley." But he never explains that the vast majority of reggae musicians haven't done Marley-style roots music since the end of the 19708, when the new dancehall style first started to take shape. "I can't do reggae like [Marley]," Shaggy continued in his conversation with Novick, "because he did it so
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well." As usual, Shaggy forfeited the opportunity to explain that he works in the dancehall tradition. One morning in early July 2001, appearing live on NBC'S Today after a street performance for a mass of screaming New Yorkers — mostly teenaged girls — Shaggy touched on the dancehall vibe in his music. When host Matt Lauer asked him to categorize tunes like "It Wasn't Me" and "Angel," Shaggy replied: "It's — well, it's — it's dancehall with more of a — with more of a crossover feel." He was finally giving a nod to his dancehall roots, but he sounded very unsure that he would be understood. "You know what I mean? And that's basically what we — we put a crossover twist to it. Basically, we just take the dancehall and we Shaggatize it, you know what I mean? I — I mean, I get what — what the, you know, the reggae purists are saying, but, at the same time, I cannot do what a Bob Marley does and do it better than him, you know. These guys are guru at what they do, they're the best . . . And, I mean, I have to put a Shaggy vibe to it, my own twist to it, and this is what I came up with, and, you know, somebody loves it. Seven million people love it."'° Actually, by the time it was all said and done for 2OOI, more than ten million people loved Hotshot enough to buy it (a staggering figure when you consider that in the Jamaican recording industry sales of even ten thousand copies can be cause for celebration). Still, the question for those who want to see reggae reach the large audience it surely deserves remains: do most Shaggy fans understand that much of what's described as his "utterly unique" style — as well as his habit of versioning old favorites and his exaggerated lover-boy stage persona — comes
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directly from the Jamaican dancehall culture to which he belongs? If the ridicule I've had to put up with from supposedly music-savvy friends who can't imagine why I'd spend my time writing a book about Shaggy the pop star is any indication, the answer is definitely "no." Although Shaggy has brought his dogamuffin-style reggae to the world stage, his roots in the rich soil of dancehall culture are still buried. As a result, his story remains untold to the many who've never experienced the wonder of a Jamaican dancehall. So, to quote U-Roy, the godfather of dancehall deejaying, the inventor of rap, and the lyrical master, "Come to school, let I tell you the musical rule."
SS
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R e g g a e Inna D a n c e h a l l Style
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When you come to a reggae concert, it's not just that you go there and hear the music. You should smell it, you should feel it, you know . . . reggae is not just a music, it's a culture, it's a way of life." — Shaggy For most North Americans, reggae is synonymous with Bob Marley, ganja, and Rastafari. To them, the term "dancehall" signifies the sparse, razor-sharp digital rhythms and gruff-voiced deejays that characterize so much modern-day reggae. ("Deejay" is the Jamaican word for rapper, and it derives from the Jamaican imitation of American radio disc jockeys.) But, as Norman Stolzoff points out in Wake the Town and Tell the People, one of the first academic studies of dancehall culture, what's generally called dancehall in North America (and bashment or ragga in Europe) is merely the tip of the iceberg of much older and broader musical and cultural traditions. "Many commentators believe that dancehall culture is a new phenomenon because the term dancehall music entered the lexicon less than fifteen years ago at the same time that Jamaican music culture was undergoing a radical creative transition," Stolzoff writes. "I contend, however, that the
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shaggy: dogamuffin style
dancehall has been a space of cultural creation and performance since the slavery era, even though the name . . . has changed over time. This is ...
to recognize that the current set of practices
known as dancehall can be traced back to earlier forms from which they derive."'" In somewhat stuffy and tangled prose, Stolzoff is explaining that the term "dancehall" involves much more than what it has come to signify in recent years. First used to describe the crisp, slow, metallic-sounding reggae developed in the late 19703 by bands like the Roots Radics and the Soul Syndicate, mixing engineer Hopton "Scientist" Brown, and producers like Don Mais, Jah Thomas, and Henry "Junjo" Lawes, dancehall has been the most popular style of reggae for the past twenty years. Because, as Stolzoff observes, the term "dancehall" has only been current for the past two decades, people generally think of it as a new phenomenon. But this couldn't be further from the truth. The dancehall — essentially an outdoor discotheque — is the birthplace of ska, rocksteady, reggae, ragga, and dub. All of Jamaica's top musicians (including everyone from Bob Marley and Lee Perry to Shabba Ranks and Shaggy) got their start in the dancehall. It is the prime force behind almost every development in Jamaican music over the past fifty years. Unfortunately, the dancehall's tremendous influence on the development of Jamaican music has often been overlooked. This is partially because most of the Jamaican artists that have gained international fame (such as Bob Marley) have done so by distancing themselves from the mainstream of the Jamaican dancehall. By the time Bob Marley's rock-influenced brand of
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roots reggae attained international exposure and mass acceptance in the late 19705, he was already out of step with the trends of the Jamaican dance. While international reggae acts like Marley, Peter Tosh, and Burning Spear were traveling around the world performing culturally and politically conscious stage shows accompanied by live bands, Jamaican dancehall artists were rapping or "toasting" lyrics about guns, sex, and having fun in the here-and-now over prerecorded rhythm (or riddim) tracks. Using a musical convention that's been made famous by hip-hop, deejays and singers would perform their "slack" lyrics live in the dancehall over the instrumental sides of records. This was early dancehall. And it marked a radical split in musical styles (and perceived cultural values) from Bob Marley's roots era. As a result, international fans and commentators came to see dancehall as something separate from reggae. They considered it to be an offshoot of American hip-hop, a misperception that persists to this day. While most historians of Jamaican music recognize Kool Here, a Jamaican who immigrated to the West Bronx in 1967, as the man most responsible for the birth of hip-hop, others tend to see the evolution quite differently. KRS-I, for instance, acknowledges the association between reggae and hip-hop, claiming that "reggae is just another hip-hop style,"" but in so doing he fails to recognize the extent of hip-hop's debt to reggae. Hip-hop started to take shape when Kool Here set up his Bronx-based Herculords sound system, combining the Jamaican tradition of talking, or Mcing, over records with the idea of using two turntables to juggle versions of the same instrumental or breakbeat sections of the funk tunes that were calling the shots in the West
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Bronx. So it's probably more accurate to say that hip-hop is just another reggae style. In any case, the close relationship between hip-hop, reggae, and sound-system culture — the heart of Jamaican music and the driving force behind every stylistic evolution in the music over the past half century — is obvious. The music that we now call dancehall (as well as, to some extent, the music that's known as hip-hop) is the contemporary creative expression of one of Jamaica's oldest arid most potent cultural and social forces, the very bloodline of Jamaican music itself: the dancehall. Given the vital role played by the Jamaican dancehall in the development of musical styles ranging from ska, rocksteady, reggae, and dub to dancehall, hip-hop, and drum and bass, it's clear that the term "dancehall" implies much more than machine-gun patois (the English dialect spoken in Jamaica) lyrics and sparse, rugged rhythms. Before we talk more about Shaggy, then, we have to understand the Jamaican dancehall more fully. Since Barrow and Dalton's Reggae: The Rough Guide is the most complete and authoritative history of Jamaican music yet compiled, it's worth consulting their definition of the term. For them, the dancehall is "Where the music is primarily heard . . . In Jamaica this is usually not a hall in the sense of part of a building, but an enclosed open space into which gigantic speakers and recordplaying equipment have been placed."'4 To refer to the stack upon stack of speakers found in today's dancehalls, with their breathtaking size and heart-stopping power, as enormous is kind of like calling the Sears Tower a really big building. Just as you have to travel to Chicago and see the Sears Tower in person in order to comprehend just how monstrous it actually is,
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you have to experience a live dance in order to appreciate the awesome volume and power of a Jamaican sound system (which is essentially a mobile discotheque). Beth Lesser, reggae photographer and author of King Jammy's — one of the few books to provide firsthand insight into the day-today runnings of sound-system culture — insists that you can't underestimate the experience of actually being at a dance. Remembering the debut of one of champion dancehall producer King Jammy's biggest hits, she focuses on the sheer power of the sound produced. "It's the bass," she says. "When you hear the bass on big speakers at a dance — the earth shakes. You have to be there. [A song can] sound like this cheesy tinny thing, [but] to hear it over the speakers is amazing. It just blew everyone away. How incredible it was — the way it sounded outdoors on big speakers just shaking the earth." While the average portable stereo system offers anywhere from twenty-five to fifty watts, Jamaica's champion sound systems, audible up to four miles away from the dancehall, have grown so massive in recent years that it's not uncommon for bass frequencies alone to be amplified by thirty thousand watts, with similarly deafening power reserved for the mid and treble ranges."' If you're familiar with nightclubs and raves, it might be helpful to imagine a Jamaican dancehall as a kind of outdoor club. Often enclosed by a bamboo fence or a wall, the dancehall itself is nothing more than a large, open lawn on which massive speakers — along with a pair of turntables, a stack of powerful amplification equipment, a mixer, a microphone, and a few effects boxes
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used to add sound effects to the dancehall experience — are set up. Much like a nightclub, the dancehall is centered on the activities of the person playing the records. What North Americans call a D.T, Jamaicans refer to as the "selector." Why? Because he selects the music for the crowd. But the relationship between the selector and his "massive," the patois word for the crowd that gathers to hear him play records, involves much more than this. Rather than playing a continuous stream of music in which each record is merged seamlessly with the one that came before, the selector aims, with each new piece of vinyl that touches the needle, to win the instant approval of the dancehall massive. When the selector touches down with a current dancehall favorite — or, even better, one of his sound system's exclusive dubplates (one-of-a-kind versions of hit songs on which the vocalist alters the lyrics to declare the supremacy of a particular sound system or selector) — the tune is usually greeted with a "forward." This is signaled by the flashing of lighters, the frenzied moving of feet, and shrieks of adulation. In this sense, dancehall fans play a much more active role in shaping the night's entertainment than do dancers at a rave or a nightclub. This isn't a passive experience! But that's just one of the things that sets the dancehall experience apart. The selector (or his MC) always introduces his sound's signature tunes and dubplates with a speech, declaring the awesome "wickedness" of the tune he's about to drop. If he doesn't introduce a song or a dubplate properly — if he doesn't build anticipation sufficiently — then he's unlikely to get the
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Reggae inna Dancehall Style
much-desired "forward" from the massive. But when an introduction works the way it's supposed to, and the selection is just what the fans want to hear, they cheer wildly, yelling "Forward!" and urging the selector to "Lick it back," "Wheel and come again," "Haul and pull up," or, simply, "Rewind." Most often, a single "wheelout" is all that's required to satisfy the massive, but the seasoned selector will try to maintain the most intense level of anticipation, "licking" sound effects — gunshots, laser beams, explosions — and starting and stopping the tune as many as twelve times before finally giving the fans what they want and letting the song play. As soon as the needle touches the vinyl for good, the selector might throw in a few sound effects for good measure, but he will never stop thinking about the music. He has to turn his attention to finding "a next tune," frantically digging through his stacks of dubplates and 453 in search of something even better. With more than three hundred sound systems on the island of Jamaica alone (to say nothing of those that have sprung up in New York, Toronto, London, Japan, and just about everywhere else in the world), dancehall business is serious, and the competition is cutthroat. Going as far back as the 19505 and 19603, when pioneering Kingston sound systems like Clement "Coxsone" Dodd's Downbeat, Arthur "Duke" Reid's Trojan, and Prince Buster's Voice of the People started competing for the right to declare themselves Jamaica's Champion or Ruling Sound, competitions known as "sound clashes" have been held. Although there are many sounds — Stone Love is probably the oldest and best known of these "juggling" sounds — that prefer to focus on "nicing up the dance" (that is, ensuring a fun time
35
shaggy: d o g a m u f f i n style
for all in attendance) rather than battling for sound-system supremacy, the fierce violence and intense competition of the clash is yet another thing that distinguishes a night at the dancehall from one at your average club. The clash emerged back in the early days of the sound system, when Coxsone Dodd, Duke Reid, Tom the Great Sebastian, Prince Buster, and others would punch it out for the title of King of Sound and Blues. It was, in part, a way to settle the turf wars that would develop between rivals playing in the same small area of Kingston. To resolve a dispute — or simply to stage an event that would give both sound systems some extra cash and good exposure — the sounds would agree to a clash, with two or more sound systems setting up in one dancehall or "lawn." Rules would be set: for instance, judges would be appointed (as they are for many of today's bigger clashes), or a special "dub fi dub" round, in which only exclusive dubplates (no commercially available 455) could be played, would take place. But, regardless of rules or format, the goal has always been the same: to win over the dancehall massive and "murder" the opposing sound system, forcing a knockout in which the rival sound admits defeat and stops playing for the rest of the night. When the sound wars first started to heat up in the 19503, sound-system owners would use rare American R&B tunes as ammunition against the competition. Although street-corner sound systems had been around since the 19403, Jamaica didn't yet have an established recording industry, so driving American R&B by the likes of Wynonie Harris and Louis Jordan ruled the dancehall. In order to ensure that their sound systems always
3b
R e g g a e inna Dancehall Style
had the hottest and most exclusive tunes — the key to coming out on top in any sound competition — early sound-system owners would take their search to all the major jazz centers in the southern U.S. Once one of these seekers found a rare tune that he judged capable of flopping a rival sound, he'd scratch off the label and scribble in a new name, disguising the tune's real identity. Lloyd Bradley writes about a legendary instance of such trickery in his work of Jamaican music history fittingly titled Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King. Having endured multiple sonic beatings at the hands of Coxsone Dodd's Downbeat system — based in large part on Dodd's possession of an exclusive known only as "Coxsone Hop" — Duke Reid discovered the infamous song's true identity. It took Reid seven years to determine that it was "Later for 'Gator," an R&B single by American tenor sax man Willis "Gatortail" Jackson. Finally, Reid was able to use the tune — along with six of Downbeat's other specials — against Dodd in a sound clash, putting an end to Coxsone's string of sound-clash titles.' As the frenzied Jamaican demand for dance-crashing American R&B started to exceed the dwindling supply, it became clear that a more permanent and reliable source of exclusive tunes would be needed as ammunition in Kingston's sound wars. As a result, top-ranking sound-system owners like Prince Buster, Duke Reid, and Goxsone Dodd started producing their own music. Initially, this American-style R&B was pressed on one-of-a-kind dubplates and played exclusively by local soundmen. Produced by sound-system operators for dancehall fans, Jamaican music
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has, since its infancy, been made by the people for the people. It is literally music created by popular demand. Although it took some time for pioneering sound-system owners/record producers to realize the potential for the sale of this music to the general public, the crucial merger of sound-system owner and record producer had been accomplished. This ensured that the music created for the dancehall — everything from R&B to ska and rocksteady, to reggae, dub, dancehall, ragga, through to Shaggy's incredible crossover success — would be engineered to keep hips swaying, feet moving, and heads bopping. Just as the fiercely competitive atmosphere of the dancehall gave birth to the Jamaican recording industry, so the demands of the dancehall massive have produced the various mutations in Jamaican music over the years. These demands initiated the style alterations that resulted in ska, rocksteady, dub, reggae, dancehall, and ragga. Given this phenomenon, it's not surprising that Shaggy wants his music to touch all kinds of people, even those who aren't necessarily reggae lovers to begin with. He will transform them. Reflecting the rich musical history of which he is a part, Shaggy concentrates on the listeners and his desire to respond to a dancehall massive numbering in the millions.
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ChapTer 3
Dancehall
Culture
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As the driving force behind every stage in the evolution of Jamaican music over the past half century, it's obvious that the dancehall is much, much more than an open-air nightclub. Derrick Harriott, a pioneering reggae and rocksteady singer and producer, describes dancehall as the hub and nexus of everyday life in Kingston's poverty-stricken ghettos. "Being part of the crowd at a big lawn [dancehall], like Forresters' Hall down on North Street, when a big sound system was playing," says Harriott, "was probably the greatest feeling in the world to any Jamaican kid. But if you had aspirations to make music then it was magical. It was . . . It was awe-inspiring . . . The sound system dances were where the ghetto people came to enjoy themselves. No airs nor graces, just be among your own people. This was a big attraction. Sometimes there was trouble, but, back then, more often there wasn't. It seem like to be a teenager in Jamaica during that era was the best thing on earth. The people would have on their best clothes — when it come to dressing up nobody can look like the ghetto people — and you would have a drink or whatever and hear the very best music. It made us feel real good about ourselves. Like we could do anything."'7
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As Barrow and Dalton report, Jamaican dancehalls have been around since the end of the 19403.' Hedley Jones, former president of the Jamaican association of musicians and the man responsible for custom building some of the greatest sound systems of the 19503, remembers Count Nicholas and Count Goody as the first to establish sound systems that were used for playing parties. They used "small RCA amplifier sets made for PA systems."'9 Indeed, as Bunny Goodison, owner and operator of the Soul Shack sound system since 1964, adds, "It started from the '40s. One of the original, real pioneers was a man named Roy White and he hangs off down by Smith Lane, that's close to Beeston Street. And he said, he initially have this thing as a PA system — a public address system — which because of his affiliation with some political grouping, he used to hire the system out to them, but you know, between speeches, he would have some kind of music to keep the crowd involved and attentive. So it sort [of] evolved out of that kind of situation.""0 While it had been the custom until then for people to get together in public places and dance to the hottest bands playing American swing and a Jamaican folk music called mento, the street-corner sound system emerged in the postwar era as the cheapest way to enjoy the music that had feet moving and bodies shaking across the island: American R&B. Although the hottest R&B hits could be heard over the radio on American stations such as WLAC in Nashville, WINZ in Miami, and WNOE in New Orleans,"' most Jamaicans didn't have access to radios at that time, so small sound systems — set up in front of liquor stores to attract customers and composed of nothing more than a turntable, an amplifier, and the largest speakers available —
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DancQhall Culture
quickly became the best means of enjoying the popular music of the day.
Although live bands playing swing (in the cities) and mento (in the countryside) had prevailed at Jamaican dances for much of the previous decade, a shift in musical tastes and the fact that sound systems were a much cheaper source of entertainment allowed the sound system to take its place as the focal point of urban Jamaican social life. As the legendary reggae producer Bunny Lee explains, the movement away from live music was, in large part, an economic necessity: "Y'see, after the orchestra play all an hour, dem [them] stop fi [for] a break, an' dem eat off all the curry goat, an' drink off all the liquor. So the promoter never make no profit — dem did prove too expensive fi the dance promoter. Dem alone eat a pot of goat! So when sound [systems] come now, the sound no tek no break. When these few sound system come, it was something different.""" Gathering on lawns, in yards, and on Kingston street corners to dance to the latest and hottest American R&B records was certainly a change of pace. But, as Hedley Jones points out, the dance (whether based on live or recorded music) has always been central to Afro-Jamaican experience. "Dancehall has always been with us," he says, "because we have always had our clubs, our market places, our booths . . . where our dances were kept, and these were known as dancehalls.""' As numerous commentators have pointed out, the dancehall — not just the music that's produced therein, but the very gathering itself — has long been the strongest force in the
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production of Jamaican culture. Stolzoff writes: "Dancehall — from the urban ghettos of Kingston to the rural districts of the countryside — is the most potent form of popular culture in Jamaica. For Jamaica's ghetto youth (the black lower class), from among whom come its most creative artists and avid fans, dancehall is their favorite recreational form. Yet dancehall is not merely a sphere of passive consumerism . . . it is a field of active cultural production, a means by which black lower-class youth project a distinct identity in local, national, and global contexts.""4 Jones suggests, and Stolzoff confirms, that the dancehall tradition generally believed to have evolved from the mento country dance can actually be traced back to Jamaica's slavery era. According to oral accounts, planters' diaries, and travelogues from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, slave dances provided an opportunity for the black lower classes to bond as a community, engage in culturally creative and expressive activities like singing and dancing, and temporarily escape from the harsh realities of their daily lives. Although his observations are marred by an archaic paternalism, we can see the roots of dancehall culture in J.B. Moreton's work on slave dances entitled Manners and Customs in the West Indian Islands, published in 1790. "Notwithstanding all their hardships," Moreton writes, the slaves "are fond of play and merriment; and if not prevented by whites, according to a law of the island, they will meet on Saturday nights, hundreds of them in gangs, and dance and sing till morning; nay, sometimes they continue their balls without intermission till Monday morning."2"
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Dancehall Culture
Although the white ruling class established laws to prohibit or limit what they saw as the "grotesque habits," "violent exercise," and "licentious," "unrestrained indulgence"2" of the slave dances — in particular, laws restricting slave gatherings and excessive nighttime noise making — the slaves continued to hold their dances. "In refusing to let the masters dictate their every move," Stolzoff observes, "the slaves advanced their own cultural agenda and political autonomy, gaining a sense of freedom and spiritual transcendence.""7 So the slave dance was not just an occasion to escape the brutality of slavery; it was also a means of forging a unique Afro-Jamaican cultural identity, of resisting the imposition of a powerful European culture, and of organizing political insurrection. Given that thirty-five percent of the slave rebellions in the British Caribbean were planned or executed in late December2" — the time of year when slave dances were most commonly held — the role of the dance in bringing people together and moving them to political action is evident. In light of this long-standing marriage between public dances and cultural and political unification, it seems natural that the first sound systems evolved out of the public address systems that were used for musical entertainment at political rallies. The dancehall has always been a site of cultural production and creativity, and this cultural consciousness — as anybody who's listened to Bob Marley "chanting down Babylon" can attest — has always had a political component. But the political component of the dancehall in the first few chapters of Jamaican music history takes a back seat.
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ChapTeR ^5&E$^ wtl^fflHU* ^f^^^
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Version
Galore
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Although Count Nicholas, Count Goody, and Count Jones are said to be the first Jamaican sound-system operators, the most widely known of the pioneers was Tom the Great Sebastian, strangely named after an act in the Barnum and Bailey circus. While Arthur "Duke" Reid's Trojan sound system, Clement "Coxsone" Dodd's Downbeat sound, and Vincent "King" Edwards's Giant had surpassed Tom the Great Sebastian as ruler of the Kingston dance by the end of the 19508, Tom the Great Sebastian left a permanent mark on the way records would be heard on the island of Jamaica. Working alongside selector Duke Vin, the man responsible for choosing which records would be played at a given dance, was Count Machuki, the MC or deejay. In the fashion of AfricanAmerican R&B radio disc jockeys, he used colorful jive and slang to introduce the records as they came on, talking or chatting over the music in an effort to hype the crowd and promote the sound. With this style of musical talkover, Machuki invented a whole new form of music. He started by delivering spoken introductions to the records, but the style was soon picked up and advanced by other deejays like King Stitt, Lord
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shaggy: doganuffin style
Comic, and, eventually, U-Roy — the man most often credited with starting the modern deejay style that's been adopted by American rappers and Jamaican dancehall artists like Shaggy. Early deejays like Count Machuki and King Stitt had largely been content to limit their introductions to a series of slick, rhyming tongue twisters. "Coming to town, your face turned to this sound," Count Machuki toasts, in typical fashion, as he introduces a Sound Dimension instrumental. "On your way up or on your way down, I want you to stop at this station for identification. I'm going to turn it over to your Sound Dimension, your music producer. Everyone on the ball!" But U-Roy (born Ewart Beckford) was the first man at the mike to take center stage and dominate the dance. Chatting or toasting over pared-down rocksteady rhythm tracks on which the vocals floated in and out of the mix, U-Roy was the first to capture the spirit of a live dancehall performance on record. When you listen to the early hits that appeared on Duke Reid's Treasure Isle label — such as "Wake the Town," "Rule the Nation," or "Wear You to the Ball," all collected on the 1970 album Version Galore — you can hear why fans began to call him "Daddy" U-Roy. In the original dancehall style, U-Roy chats over the vocal, urging all dance fans to "Come to school, let I tell you the musical rule." Not only did the Originator, as he is also called, insert his slick, jive-talk lyrics into the open spaces of songs (as foundation deejays like Count Machuki had done), but he went even further, ultimately creating a new musical genre. He did this by taking notice of the beat and riding the rhythm throughout the tune, often creating a dialogue with the vocalist on the record he was
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Version Galore
toasting over. In U-Roy's version of the Paragons's "Wear You to the Ball," for example, the Originator toasts along with lead singer John Holt's vocals, adding a running commentary directed at his dancehall fans. As soon as Holt starts singing the song's chorus, "I'm gonna wear you to the ball tonight, put on your best dress tonight," U-Roy jumps in, urging all dance fans to listen to the vocalist. "Be your best," he says, referring to the idea that dancehall fans should always come dressed to impress and ready to dance, '"cause this gonna be your musical t e s t . . . Be wise and deadly, put on your best." As the godfather of the modern dancehall style, U-Roy offers a little advice to anybody bold enough to pick up the mike at a dance: "It's best to say something before [the vocalist on record] or immediately after him," he warns, "but don't come in [at] the same time." "Whatever you do, just do it in time.""9 Although U-Roy "never thought people would make money out of this deejay business, talking over records," these early singles for Duke Reid soared to the top of the Jamaican charts, and the tunes occupied the top three spots for six consecutive weeks.1' Soon deejay versions were more popular than the original vocal tracks. Fans accustomed to hearing the deejay toasting along with the vocal live in the dancehall came to expect the same sound when they purchased the tune on record. Following the path blazed by the Originator, deejays from many of Jamaica's top sound systems soon found their way onto vinyl. Cutting tunes for producers such as Duke Reid, Coxsone Dodd, Keith Hudson, and Bunny Lee, deejay Dennis Alcapone of El Paso Hi-Fi was soon joined by Spanish Town natives I-Roy and Prince Jazzbo, as well as Trinity,
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Jah Stitch, U-Brown, Dillinger, Doctor Aliraantado, Big Joe, Jah Woosh, and Big Youth as the most popular and successful deejays of the 19703. Each performer had his signature sound: Dennis Alcapone is instantly recognizable for his characteristic yelps, squeals, and high-pitched screams of "Yeah!"; Jazzbo for his gruff, "rockstone" voice; and I-Roy for his instructive, intelligent, and original lyrics. Yet it was Big Youth who would have the most enduring influence. Toasting over the slower reggae rhythms that began to dominate Kingston in the early 19703 — as opposed to producer Duke Reid's faster, bouncier rocksteady tracks, which U-Roy had started out on — Big Youth changed the art of deejaying in terms of both the musical backing and the lyrical content. Rather than just responding to the vocalist by injecting jive phrases designed to get dancers on their feet, Big Youth used the song he was toasting over as a vehicle to broadcast his political and religious beliefs. He would make each rhythm he voiced radically his own, chanting Rastafarian lyrics, delivering the ghetto news, and speaking black history. Reputedly the first reggae musician to remove his tarn during a performance and shake his dreadlocks onstage in a defiant and rebellious display of Rastafarian faith, Big Youth changed forever the role of the sound-system deejay. The primary goal of U-Roy and other first-generation deejays had been to entertain dance fans, but Big Youth took things to a whole new level. After Big Youth, the deejay became entertainer, teacher, historian, and preacher to the black lower class, the "ghetto youth" living in abject poverty — the people who have always been reggae's core audience.
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Galore
Many of Big Youth's finest moments are known only to dance fans who happened to hear him live on the Lord Tippertone HiFi; other such moments have been lost on 453 that appeared in limited numbers on his Negusa Nagast, Augustus Buchanan, Nichola Delita, and Tanisha labels. Still, more than a few of Big Youth's flashes of genius have been preserved on wax, enabling curious fans to get a sense of what the fuss was all about. On "Screaming Target," for example, he can be heard delivering his customarily conscious lyrics over producer Augustus "Gussie" Clarke's cut of "No, No, No." With the rhythm track or version side of this dancehall hit sure to move the feet of his dancehall audience, Jah Youth reaches out to all the ghetto youths, preaching about the importance of education and literacy. "I say yes and you should never say no," he begins, answering vocalist K.C. White's refrain of "no, no, no" in the classic deejay style. "Literacy is a thing that you should go away with," he coolly rumbles, adding, "you should never be a fool . . . you should go to school and learn the rule . . . go to a literate place so you can come get civilized." Switching from social to religious concerns, Big Youth adapts the same cut of the "No, No, No" rhythm for a tune called "Concrete Jungle." On it, he chants an echo-drenched Rastafarian take on Kingston's rough ghetto life, the life of the "sufferers" who live "way downtown, as I would say." Offering a bold —- and, at the time, quite radical — alternative to what Rastafarians see as their captivity in the Babylonian concrete jungle or city, Big Youth gives the ghetto sufferers a way out. Rastafarians or Israelites (remember Desmond Dekker's international smash hit "The Israelites") see themselves in contrast to the corrupt and faithless
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Babylonians, who hold God's chosen people captive. They find salvation through their belief in the divinity of Jah Rastafari, His Imperial Majesty, Emperor Haile Selassie I. Known alternatively as the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, and the Conquering Lion in the Tribe of Judah, Ras Tafari Makonnen, formerly Prince Regent of Abyssinia, was crowned King Negus Negusta on November 2, 1930. With his coronation — a major event in the lives of oppressed black people across the globe — he assumed the title of Emperor Haile Selassie I and took his rightful place in a long line of African kings who (Rastafarians generally believe) can be traced all the way back to the biblical King David. Marcus Mosiah Garvey, the Jamaican black rights activist and founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (through which he set up the Negro World newspaper and the Black Star Line, a shipping company for transporting black people to a new, independent state in Africa, the homeland and symbolic paradise), foresaw the coronation of a black king. Due at least partially to his prophetic appeal to black people to "Look to Africa when a black king shall be crowned," for "the day of deliverance is near,"3' many Jamaicans understood Haile Selassie's coronation to be a sign that Judgment Day was at hand. Liberation from generations of slavery and suffering couldn't be far behind. In a political and religious culture dedicated to the elevation of black consciousness and the improvement of material living conditions for black people, it's not surprising that people took Garvey's prophecy quite literally. Rastafarianism started out in the 19303 as a response to the teachings of Leonard P. Howell, Archibald Dunkley, and Joseph
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Version Galore
Hibbert. It was essentially a small cult that took Marcus Garvey's Ethiopianism to its extreme, apocalyptic conclusion by recognizing Haile Selassie as the Messiah (rather than simply a black African king). Through the significant contributions of successive generations of Rasta bredren — from Big Youth and Bob Marley in the 19703 to the now-popular dancehall deejays Capleton and Sizzla — Rastafarianism has been a powerful force in shaping black consciousness, both in Jamaica and "in foreign" — "in foreign" being the patois term for "off the island." When, in late 1972, Big Youth started chanting Rastafarian lyrics hailing Emperor Selassie as the "Iron Lion of Zion," people were still looking on Rastafarianism as a fanatical and dangerous faith. Jamaica's upper and middle classes would only be comfortable as long as that faith was confined to the fringes of their society. Even though many of Jamaica's ghetto dwellers had grown used to the rhythmic contributions of Rastafarian drumming (as mentioned earlier, this drumming has been a central rhythmic feature of Jamaican music ever since Count Ossie and the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari teamed up with the Folkes Brothers to record the original "Oh Carolina" for Prince Buster in 1959), Rastafarianism was still a long way from achieving mainstream acceptance. Long before singers, deejays, and producers started to jump on what singer Max Romeo called the "Rasta Bandwagon" in the mid-1970s, Kingston's music world — to say nothing of the general population — regarded Rastafarians with a combination of ignorance and fear. For instance, Duke Reid, an ex-cop who owned the Trojan sound system and the Treasure Isle record label, was outspoken in his
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dislike of "natty dread" — and Reid was by no means alone. Byron Lee was never keen on allowing Rasta musicians to work at his Dynamic Studios, promoters weren't likely to book dread acts for stage shows, and clubs and band leaders were hesitant to employ Rasta musicians. Musician Earl Sixteen lost his job playing with the Boris Gardner Happening because he took the stage one night with a few stray dreadlocks falling out of his hat.5" As late as 1969, a full three years after Haile Selassie's historic visit to Jamaica, The Melodians's anthemic "Rivers of Babylon" was banned from Jamaican radio because on it lead singer Brent Dowe voices the words "Oh Fari," a reference to His Imperial Majesty.'33 Gradually, Jamaica's dispossessed came to recognize the religion, but it was still extremely marginal in early 1973, when Big Youth removed his tarn during a performance at the Carib Theater and fearlessly shook out his dreadlocks. "It had to be up to deejays such as we on sound systems to bring [Rasta] forward," Big Youth told interviewer Lloyd Bradley. "Back in those days, if you was Rasta even your parents would ignore you, you come like an outcast, so there was many situations in the record business that at that time Rasta was kept out of. But on the sound systems there wasn't that kind of control because there was plenty of sound systems run by people like us. You didn't have to get into no establishment, and as I am a man who, when mi come as Rasta, say if mi have to trim my natty dread then mi no wan' go there. That was my conviction, so I went on the sound systems where we was busting things like togetherness love, instead of boy-girl love. It was on the sound systems long before any deejay made a conscious record. Up until that point deejaying was really just
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Version Galore
about nicing up the dance; none of it wasn't saying nothing — the whole thing was just a baby baby . . . chick-a-bow . . . bend down low situation, while people dem was hungry. You have Daddy U-Roy before, Dennis Alcapone and all those bredda was there and it wasn't that they weren't working, but it wasn't enough. The people had enough of pure dibidibidabidoo, they couldn't take it anymore without some sort of alternative that represent how they feel."'*4 To many of Jamaica's ghetto youth, Big Youth was just the man to provide this alternative. Through his "conscious" toasting on the Tippertone Hi-Fi, he kick-started the initial, brief "roots" or "culture" era of reggae (1975—80). To many fans of Jamaican music — especially those who first came to reggae through the international exposure gained by Bob Marley and the Wailers, Burning Spear, Culture, Black Uhuru, and a few others during this brief period when roots was the dominant music — reggae would never again attain the awe-inspiring power, beauty, truth, and wonder that seemed to flow through just about every note to emerge from the island during that five-year "golden age." While anybody who's listened to the achingly beautiful music of singers such as Bob Marley, Jacob Miller, Junior Byles, Dennis Brown, Gregory Isaacs, Max Romeo, Horace Andy, and Yabby You, vocal groups like the Lee Perry-produced Congos, Israel Vibration, The Chantells, The Meditations, and The Twinkle Brothers, not to mention the offerings of brilliant deejays like Big Youth, Trinity, Dillinger, Jah Stitch, Jah Woosh, and countless others can attest, roots-era reggae stands up to the best music produced at any time, in any place.
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However, to the detriment of the Jamaican recording industry and music lovers around the world, many influential reggae writers, critics, and historians (including Lloyd Bradley and Grammy committee cochairman Roger Steffens) insist that the roots era, in Steffens's words, "set the bar too high." As a result, most of the music that's come out of Jamaica in the past twenty years has been dismissed as inferior — much of it is not even considered reggae. For many purists, reggae itself has become synonymous with roots. While the music's origins in the ska and rocksteady that ruled before roots grabbed the spotlight are certainly widely appreciated, much of what has followed in the wake of the roots golden age — especially the "digital" productions that have carried the swing since King Jammy's legendary "Sleng Teng" rhythm conquered the dancehall in 1985 — has been granted only limited international exposure and even less respect from most of those who write the history books and hand out the awards. As anybody who has listened to modern-day talents as diverse, energetic, and inspired as Shaggy, Sizzla, Capleton, Anthony B, Cobra, Merciless, Bounty Killer, Beenie Man, Baby Cham, Garnett Silk, Luciano, Beres Hammond, Morgan Heritage, Junior Kelly, Buju Banton, and Shabba Ranks can attest, reggae did not come to an apocalyptic end when roots producer extraordinaire Lee "Scratch" Perry destroyed his Black Ark Studio in 1979. Nor did it dissolve when Bob Marley passed away just two years later. As many followers of Jamaican music realize, Bob Marley's rockstyle brand of international roots reggae was, in spite of its vast popularity and transcendent genius, already out of step with the
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V e r s i o nG a l o r e
rapidly changing sounds emerging from West Kingston's ghettobased dancehalls towards the end of the 19703. Although roots music continued to dominate Jamaican record production up until 1980 (and it enjoyed a powerful resurgence in 1993 that continues to this day), pioneering dancehall producers like Don Mais, Jah Thomas, Henry "Junjo" Lawes, Sugar Minott, Linval Thompson, Leon Synmoie, and Percy "Jah Life" Chin had already started to change the sound of reggae, laying the foundation for what would become dancehall music. Working primarily from recuts or versions of rocksteady and reggae hits recorded at Coxsone Dodd's Studio One a decade before, the early dancehall producers brilliantly managed to return to reggae's origins while at the same time crafting a sound that was completely fresh and new. With Scientist, dub inventor King Tubby's whiz-kid apprentice, at the mixing board and tough rhythms supplied by dancehall's premier session band, the Roots Radics, early dancehall grabbed Jamaica by the ear with a sound that was bare, raw, and menacing. In contrast to the bright, bouncy, horn-drenched rhythms of Sly & Robbie's Revolutionaries, the top session band of the previous era, the dancehall rhythms laid down by the Roots Radics were rough and rugged — pure drum and bass. They weren't, however, to the taste of many who had been weaned on earlier, gentler vibes. Still, it wasn't so much with the rough Radics sound that so many roots fans — especially those outside Jamaica — took issue. More than simply a slowing of the beat and a paring down to raw drum and bass, this new dancehall sound launched a revolution in style and attitude. In an era when deejay records were being
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made in unprecedented quantities — for the first time outnumbering new 453 by singers — the music's focus shifted away from what Barrow and Dalton call the "militant confrontations and dreams of paradise in Africa" that had characterized the roots era. It was now moving "towards having the best time possible in the here and now — that is, in the dancehall."35 The rise of the dancehall coincided with the 1980 election as prime minister of conservative JLP candidate Edward Seaga. Seaga rejected the values of democratic socialism that had been so strongly aligned with Rastafarianism under Michael Manley; the former prime minister had recruited Rasta musicians to his cause throughout the 19703. The new dancehall style turned its back (for the most part) on spiritual and political concerns, embracing consumerism, "slack" or explicit sexuality, gun talk, hypermasculinity, and local humor. Manley had come to power by presenting himself as the biblical Joshua leading his people in rebellion against the Pharaoh — complete with a rod of correction that he used to "lick down" the evildoers — and by promising, as Delroy Wilson sings, that "Better Must Come." By contrast, Seaga (or ciAga, as those skeptical of the CIA'S role in his electoral victory called him) achieved power by appealing to the wealthier factions of Jamaican society with the promise of a "liberal" trade agenda that would supply the middle and upper classes with long-unavailable consumer goods.5" After living for eight years with democratic socialist policies that had failed to improve their lives in any significant way, most ordinary Jamaicans agreed that it was time for a change. Unfortunately, Jamaica's two-party system offered voters no real
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alternative to Seaga. So they elected a man so eager to please the international investment community and embrace the global free trade agenda forming the basis of the emergent "Reaganomics" that he was the first foreign head of state to visit America's new president after he took office in January 1981.^ Having received more than six hundred million in loans and foreign investment under the Reagan government's Caribbean Basin Initiative — in addition to accepting the "structural adjustment" programs imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (programs which still have a profound effect on the lives of Jamaicans to this day) — Seaga's government had no choice but to submit to the will of foreign capital and privatize many of the industries that had been state-owned under Manley.'" In combination with the elimination of tariffs on imported goods, the creation of exploitative free trade zones, the abolition of price controls on food, and drastic cuts to social programs, Seaga's aggressively antisocialist policies constituted nothing less than a counterrevolution. His agenda caused "hardships that disproportionately affected the poor."1" With a flick of the wrist and a stroke of the pen, Rasta-socialist dreams of living together in "love and I-nity" had come to an end. The new ideology was grounded in the American rhetoric of rugged individualism, whereby personal material gain is accessible to all — provided that one is willing to simply put forth the effort. According to this philosophy, both poverty and wealth are reflective of one's work ethic. "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps," and you'll magically convert wretched poverty into comfortable living.
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To support his radical economic initiatives, then, Seaga required a revolution of the mind. So he encouraged the masses to reject everything associated with Manley's socialism of the 19703 — especially Rastafari and the revolutionary spirit of roots reggae. Still, the spirit of Rastafari and the cries for a people's revolution never completely lost credibility amongst the ghetto dwellers who have always been dancehall's most avid fans. Following in the wake of an intensely violent general election that had claimed more than eight hundred lives, bringing the island nation to the verge of civil war and forcing numerous sound systems to stop playing or risk politically motivated destruction, a disillusioned new generation of dancehall singers and deejays turned away from "politricks" and religion and put their energy into easing the suffering of day-to-day life in the ghetto. Although the music was, for the most part, marked by slower and darker rhythms, hit songs of the time, including Michigan and Smiley's "Nice Up the Dance," Bunny Wailer's "Cool Runnings," and Triston Palmer's "Entertainment," eloquently reflect the desire to "forget your troubles and dance" that swept through Jamaica following the bloody election. In this climate, young dancehall up-and-comers like the Lone Ranger, General Echo, Charlie Chaplin, Josey Wales, Yellowman, Barrington Levy, Little John, Triston Palmer, Michael Palmer, Half Pint, and others often saw their turn at the mike as an opportunity to entertain rather than instruct. They opted to chat about sex, tell jokes, big up themselves and their sound, and generally "nice up the dance." Still, we shouldn't see this shift in the music's focus (from exposing the exploitation of
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the Babylonian system to having fun in the here-and-now) as a failure of either socialism or the Rasta revolution. The spirit of social betterment and hope for a brighter tomorrow was kept alive during this "slackness" era by the likes of Brigadier Jerry, Charlie Chaplin, Half Pint, Sugar Minott, and Admiral Tibett, all of whom continued to perform cultural and conscious lyrics in the dancehall style. And we can't attribute the general turning away from culture and reality issues entirely to a shift in the country's official ideological stance or an increased demand for pure entertainment. A new generation of deejays and singers had emerged, and rising stars of the Jamaican music world, like chatters General Echo and the Lone Ranger, needed a new style to distinguish themselves from older mike men like Big Youth and Trinity. If the political and religious messages of the first generation of cultural deejays had, as Big Youth claims, caught fire because people had simply "had enough of pure dibidibidabidoo," then it's safe to say that the return to the original dancehall style was at least partially a reaction against a Rasta aesthetic that had become cliched and hollow. By the end of the 19703, dancehall fans had had just about enough of "Jah Rastafari!" — a cry of faith that had all but lost its meaning after becoming a precondition for dancehall success in the course of the decade. But whatever the underlying reasons for the ascendance of the dancehall style, it took the island by storm at the end of the 19705, and there was no question that it was here to stay. Ranking Joe and Brigadier Jerry — who came up through Daddy U-Roy's "deejay academy," working alongside the Originator on
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his King Stur-Gav Hi-Fi — are recognized as the two chatters who had the biggest influence on the development of dancehall toasting. This toasting, through the music of Shaggy and others, has become familiar throughout the world. Although this scatinfluenced, fast-talking style — often marked by rolled Rs and yelps of "Bim!" or "Rabbit!" — is most frequently associated with later deejays like the Lone Ranger and his brother Clint Eastwood, it began on U-Roy's sound system. In a partial return to the deejay style of the early 19703, the dancehall deejay's job was, once again, to entertain rather than instruct. But instead of rapping over hit songs and trading licks with the vocalist on record as foundation deejays had done, the dancehall deejays (whether in the dancehall or in the studio) tended to toast over instrumental cuts that didn't contain a single note of the original vocals. Now, more than ever before, reggae was almost pure drum and bass, and the deejay had carte blanche to improvise over the rhythm track, which was usually an instrumental side to a Studio One hit that all dancehall fans would be familiar with. Slim Smith's "Never Let Go," for instance, became a huge dancehall hit when stripped of its original vocals and refashioned as the Lone Ranger's "Answer." More than twenty years later, this Studio One rhythm continues to be one of the most versioned in reggae history, enjoying an almost annual updating (the most recent features dancehall and new roots artists like Sizzla, Anthony B, and Beenie Man). Now that this shift away from melody and harmony had occurred, it was up to the fast-talking deejay to entertain. Doing away with Big Youth's laid-back chanting style and Rasta consciousness,
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the new generation of chatters were all about "mashing up the dance" with pure energy, excitement, and flow. This isn't to say that lyrics didn't matter anymore — they did — but the people expected the deejays to give them what they wanted. And, for whatever reason, sex and gun talk, local humor, and fun-loving dancehall vibes were the order of the day. Popular sound systems of the early 19803 — such as Gemini Disco, Virgo Hi-Fi, Stereophonic, Ray Symbolic, Aces International, Metro Media, Killamanjaro, and Arrows — were now attempting to "murder" the opposition by spinning the version sides to popular 455 and having deejays take turns freestyling lyrics overtop in what is called a "rub-a-dub session." Because of this, the Jamaican appetite for live dancehall deejaying began to dominate the recording and production side of the industry as well. Whereas once deejay versions were released only after the original vocal cut had already made its mark, they were now starting to come out before the concomitant vocals had been pressed. As a result, deejays chatting about sex, guns, and the dancehall itself — all in a deep Jamaican patois that's indecipherable to the untrained ear — began to supplant singers as reggae's primary hit makers. With this change in the music's emphasis — from singing to deejaying; from recording to more live improvisation; from culture and religion to hedonism — reggae lost much of its international appeal. Although, as reggae D.T, journalist, and foundation sound-system tape collector Dave Kingston pointed out to me, almost all of the lyrics that appeared on Yellowman's first two albums were actually lifted from General Echo's dancehall repertoire, Yellowman is the deejay most often associated with what many see as the
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descent of reggae lyrics into mindless dancehall chatter. Having cut his teeth on Aces Disco in the early 19805, Yellowman went on to rule Kingston's dancehalls and the Jamaican recording industry between 1981 and 1984, outselling deejays and singers alike.4" An albino who had been orphaned at a very young age, Yellowman boldly and brilliantly turned social stigma into a recipe for dancehall success. Albinos are roughly equivalent to lepers in Jamaica's rigid social hierarchy, so it was unusual, to say the least, to see an albino holding the mike at a dancehall session. But dance fans went crazy for Yellowman, fully appreciating the courage, skill, energy, and humor that he brought to each performance — at every opportunity, he'd tell his audience how sexy he was and how all the ladies were "mad over" him. Yellowman was the first deejay to sign a record deal with a major label — CBS Records, home to everyone from jazz greats to Pink Floyd. While he may not have been the suave lover-man he imagined himself to be, he was very popular, especially with female dance fans, traditionally the largest market for the slack dancehall records usually considered degrading to women. With more than three hundred tunes already under his belt, Yellowman is one of the most prolific reggae performers ever. He exposed worldwide audiences to the sex talk and self-promotion that had been running Kingston's dancehalls towards the end of the roots era and that was first collected on vinyl with the 1979 release of General Echo's The Slackest LP. Yet, despite his massive output and enormous popularity, Yellowman never managed to achieve Bob Marley's level of success. Neither did he have anything approaching Marley's — or Shaggy's — international impact. This was, no doubt, partly due to alterations that the label made
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to his music, but the lyrical content — decidedly unpopular with those who loved roots reggae — was also to blame. The drastic music changes that had taken place in the three years that separated Bob Marley's death in 1981 from Yellowman's breakthrough in 1984 had caused many who had previously considered themselves reggae fans to fall out of touch with the new dancehall sound. They just weren't ready to hear the rough vibes of the West Kingston streets. So when Yellowman arrived, his music sounded more familiar to America's growing tribe of rap fans than it did to those who had fallen in love with the likes of Bob Marley, Black Uhuru, and Dennis Brown. And with the next major event in the development of Jamaican music —- the arrival of King Jammy's "digital" "Sleng Teng" rhythm in 1985 — the distance between American rap and the music booming out of the zinc-roofed shacks that lined the winding paths of Jamaica's poorest ghettos would grow even shorter.
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Reggae has always been marked by explosive, contagious trends and rapid-fire changes in style. It is in a perpetual state of evolution. From the brief ska era of the 19608 to the even shorter rocksteady period (1966-68) to the early reggae, roots, and dancehall epochs, the music has reinvented itself every few years in response to the demands of Jamaica's fickle dancehall fans. Critics and historians often disagree when it comes to identifying the watershed moments in the music's history — for example, was a song by Larry Marshall called "Nanny Goat" the first to break with the faster rocksteady style and kick-start the reggae phase of evolution? Yet everybody agrees on one thing: the face of Jamaican music was forever changed on February 23, 1985. That day, facing off against the Black Scorpio sound system in what would be a legendary clash, King Jammy's, the champion sound of the latter half of the 19803, gave the Jamaican public a glimpse of dancehall's future by unleashing the island's first "digital" rhythm. It came in the form of Wayne Smith's "Under Mi Sleng Teng," a traditional dancehall workout praising the powers of ganja. Although there was nothing lyrically revolutionary about the song, the powerful, hypnotic, rumbling bass
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line — recorded for the first time on a keyboard rather than a bass guitar — sent shock waves through the music industry. It created an unquenchable thirst for "digital" rhythms that would alter the course of Jamaican music. It is safe to say that without the Sleng Teng, there would be no Shabba Ranks, no Buju Banton, and, most certainly, no Shaggy. Beth Lesser, reggae journalist and author of King Jammy's, the definitive book about Jamaica's ruling sound at the dawn of the digital or "ragga" era, was in the throng of fans gathered on the lawn at Kingston's Cinema n that night to witness the big clash. She writes: The night of the 23rd, people began to gather on the Waltham early. The sounds were warming up with the apprentices while the big artists were arriving. Black Scorpio opened the showdown with the full complement of Sassafras and Trees and regulars
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Culture Lee, Wayne Palmer, and Michael Jahsone. Jah Screw, the selector, was armed with dubplates by Frankie Paul (the Scorpio productions) like "The Closer I Get to You," as well as Earl Sixteen's "Sweet Soul Rockin," and "Making Tracks," Bobby Melody, Little John, and Johnny Osbourne. On Jammy's side were John Wayne, Echo Minott, General Leon, Screecha Nice, Tullo T, Junior Reid, Tonto Irie, and Pompidou. Tupps was selecting with confidence, knowing that he had a bag full of Sleng Teng to throw down. Every name entertainer was there from U-Roy to Leroy Smart to witness the confrontation.
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By nine o'clock the yard was full and more people were coming through the door. Scorpio was getting hot with Johnny Osbourne's "Reasons" and "Show Me Your Sign." After an hour, the current went over to Jammy. Wise Tupps opened right away with Sleng Teng and the crowd went wild! People were cheering and throwing their hands in the air, blowing noise-makers and whistles. The bass sound that was coming out of those boxes was like nothing that had ever been heard before. It was absolutely clean — powerful and pounding. It just stopped your heart. And it had all come out of a "music box," as the unfamiliar electronic keyboards were referred to then. Tupps was putting on Sugar Minott's "War and Crime" when suddenly the melody was interrupted by the entrance of armed police officers, Mi6s on their shoulders. . . . [T]he clash proceeded, but the verdict was already in — Sleng Teng had won the day. What was it about a chance combination on a tiny Casio keyboard that could mesmerize an entire nation and change forever the course of reggae music? Once this "computer" rhythm appeared, there was no turning back. Even Jammy had to reluctantly shelve over fifty "human" rhythms he had made with the High Times band and not used yet, because no one wanted to hear them. All they wanted was Sleng Teng — literally. Album after album of pure Sleng Teng versions were released and every single one sold. It was Jammy's very first number one record in Jamaica (although he had had several abroad). Yes, "the Sleng Teng dominate bad, bad," as Tupps recalls.4"
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Recorded for champion producer and sound-system owner King Jammy and released to the Jamaican public in a climate of near hysteria, Wayne Smith's "Under Mi Sleng Teng" started out as nothing more than a slowed-down rock and roll preset on a tiny Casio keyboard. Noel Dailey, an aspiring dancehall singer, would program basic reggae rhythms on his Casio keyboard — or "music box," as the new technology was then known — and then use these backing tracks to sharpen his vocal skills. One day, having slowed down a preset rock rhythm in order to sing reggae overtop, he and Wayne Smith accidentally stumbled upon the distinctive bass line that would form the basis for the pounding "Sleng Teng" rhythm. They then lost that magic preset and had to search for days before they found it again. Once they'd recovered the rhythm, the "Sleng Teng" lyrics leapt into Smith's head, and he took the song to Jammy for recording. Contrary to many reports, the Casio keyboard that gave birth to the "Sleng Teng" was not used in the actual recording of the tune. Instead, session man Tony Asher laid down the rhythm track on a more professional keyboard. Asher was one of the few studio musicians in Kingston who was comfortable with the new keyboard technology. The demand for the pounding bass and crisp treble of the "Sleng Teng" rhythm was huge. Less than twenty years after the rhythm's initial release, reggaeriddims.com, a site that keeps track of reggae recordings, lists at least 166 different versions. More (like Canadian hip-hop star Kardinal Offishall and Jamaican Bounty Killer's "Bacardi Slang") are coming out every week, and still others (including the "Sick" rhythm, Pinchers's "Agony" rhythm, and Anthony Redrose's "Tempo" rhythm) are
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merely a note or two removed from the original creation. Not only was the demand for digital or keyboard-based rhythms so great that Jammy had to put off using backing tracks he had already created with Earl "Chinna" Smith's High Times Band, but other producers were forced to abandon their "human" rhythms and join the digital age as well. To the dismay of roots fans, who had grown to love the sound of real drum and bass played through warm tube amplifiers, the hypnotic drone of the new keyboard creations quickly mesmerized the nation. The new style digitized the deejay-oriented style of reggae's dancehall era, giving birth to ragga, the most recent strand of Jamaican music, known for its sharp digital rhythms and its tough-talking, roughhouse deejays.
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Orville Richard Burrell was born into the musical hotbed of Kingston, Jamaica, on October 22, 1968, but fans know little about his early life. Countless interviewers have asked Shaggy how he got his somewhat bizarre moniker, but few have focused on his childhood years. For the record, young Orville was such a skinny, shaggy-haired kid that his grade school classmates nicknamed him "Shaggy" after the equally skinny and shaggy-haired character from the Scooby Doo cartoon. "I am a first child of reggae and dancehall music," Shaggy insists, pointing out that he's always been "a music listener." "I'm non-athletic. I don't run and kick soccer, I don't watch TV much. I'm mostly into music.'"" Having grown up in Rae Town, a small East Kingston ghetto facing the Norman Manley Airport, Shaggy has always had that distinctive reggae groove coursing through his veins. With sweet reggae vibes pounding from the speakers of Kingston's countless sound systems and pulsing through the streets every day, music is the lifeblood of the city. It brings hope to every ghetto youth bold enough to dream of dancehall success and a life beyond the concrete jungle and a
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much-needed dose of lighthearted fun to many others who simply want to forget their troubles and dance. Like fellow Rae Town dancehall stars Sluggy Ranks and Wayne Wonder (both of whom Shaggy still keeps in touch with — Wonder does guest vocals on "Something Different" from Boombastic), Shaggy grew up in the presence of Kingston's warring sound systems. It would have been impossible for him not to have known about King Jammy's Superpower. It would also have been impossible for him, and every other aspiring reggae star, to have avoided the influence of King Jammy's productions. To understand the development of Shaggy's signature sound, we first have to understand the nature of that powerful influence and the radical changes in reggae music that occurred during the mid-to-late 19803. By 1986, King Jammy's, Jamaica's ghetto-based champion sound from 1985 until the end of the decade, had already established sound supremacy and translated local success into a series of modest breakthroughs in the international market. Not only had King Jammy produced reggae's first digital or ragga rhythm in the form of Wayne Smith's "Under Mi Sleng Teng" (arguably one of the ten most important 453 in the entire history of reggae music), but he had also developed a promotional system that would give many of his artists the global exposure they so badly wanted. In contrast to many Jamaican producers — who would typically ride the wave of a hot performer and flood the market with 455 and LPS of his material — Lloyd "Jammy" James developed a strategy for grooming his stable of singers and deejays for individual success. By organizing touring stage shows for his performers, promoting
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them on his sound system, and carefully releasing their new material, King Jammy helped the likes of Admiral Bailey, Josey Wales, Chaka Demus, Lieutenant Stitchie, Shabba Ranks, Tiger, Pinchers, and Cocoa Tea score major local hits. Like Sugar Minott's Youth Promotion organization, Maurice Johnson's Black Scorpio, U-Roy's King Stur-Gav Hi-Fi, and many others, Jammy's Superpower was more than simply a sound system. It was the very heart and soul of the ghetto to which it belonged. Providing opportunities to local youths with visions of dancehall success, sound-system bosses were, in many ways, the godfathers or dons of their communities. Producers like Jammy and Sugar Minott did more than launch the careers of a legion of artists and employ full-time studio technicians, session musicians, selectors, and the "box men" who would "string up" the sound for each performance. They also provided food, shelter, and spliff to many poor ghetto youths, creating a surrogate family for them inside the studio gates. By the time Jammy ascended to Kingston's musical throne in 1985, he had already helped to establish the careers of the roots vocal group Black Uhuru and singer Half Pint. He transformed a tiny one-bedroom studio in the rough Waterhouse district of Kingston into the headquarters of his digital reggae empire and went to work developing careers. The importance of his accomplishments cannot be overstated. The headquarters for Jammy's Superpower at 38 St. Lucia Road became a veritable reggae academy, like Coxsone Dodd's Studio One in the 19603. Many of the first deejays to bring dancehall music to a global audience got their start as members of Jammy's family (including the likes of
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Shabba Ranks, Lieutenant Stitchie, Tiger, Chaka Demus, Bounty Killer, and Beenie Man). And former studio musicians Steelie and Clevie, as well as ace engineer Bobby "Digital" Dixon, used their experience at Jammy's as a stepping-stone to success. Graduating with honors from 38 St. Lucia Road, these top-notch producers have been powerful forces in determining the shape of reggae music for almost twenty years. Steelie and Clevie have most recently had huge success with "Hey Baby," a collaboration between No Doubt and dancehall star Bounty Killer. In interviews, Shaggy has never described the extent of his involvement with the sound-system culture in his Kingston neighborhood. He has, however, admitted that he didn't dream of being a "reggae star or even being a reggae musician."41 In saying this, he draws attention to the vast difference between himself and so many of his contemporaries, many of whom would sneak out at night to hear their favorite sound systems play until early morning. "I [got] addicted to it," dancehall deejay Burro Banton told reggae journalist Tero Kaski back in 1983. "If I don't go to a dance first," he says, "I can't sleep"44 at night. Most other dancehall success stories started the same way, but Shaggy rarely mentions the dancehall as an influence — much less a gravitational force that pulled him into the music. But he does identify Peacemaker as one of the sounds he enjoyed as a kid. "I grew up on this old tune," Shaggy says of Prince Buster's version of "Oh Carolina," the song that played such a large part in getting his career started in 1992. "Peacemaker was the sound that used to play it because the kids used to sing 'Raas Bumba Claat' [a patois curse that literally means "used tampon"] to it. They could curse to it so it was a hip thing."40
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Rik Rok and Shaggy eelebrating their wins at the Billboard Music Awards on Decembe
Performing at Dodger's Stm in Los Angeles in 2
Shaggy performing in 1995.
Shaggy and Rik Rok on Top of the Pops in London
Shaggy and Rayvon At the Teen Choice Awards, 2001
Shaggy and his Grammy at the 38th Grammy Awards in 1996.
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Although Shaggy prefers to list world-famous names like Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, and Gregory Isaacs as the artists who have had the greatest impact on his style (at times even going so far as to say, "I have no musical influences. I just listen to what the radio plays"), a quick flip through the hits of early ragga deejays like Lieutenant Stitchie, Chaka Demus, Admiral Bailey, and Shabba Ranks — as well as later mike men like Buju Banton — will demonstrate that Shaggy's roots are firmly planted in the dancehall. If you listen to "Great Ambition," for example, Lieutenant Stitchie's mid-ipSos cut of the massive "Kuff" rhythm, it will be clear that Shaggy's gruff-voiced toasting owes a sizable debt to many of the deejays who came to fame performing on Jammy's Superpower. "Yes it a me plan, it a me great ambition," Stitchie toasts, inflecting his voice with a deep, back-of-the-throat rumble that could easily be mistaken for what the pop press identifies as Shaggy's "utterly unique" vocal style. Those who still need proof of Shaggy's debt to popular Jammy's deejays should also have a listen to Shabba Ranks's "Mr. Loverman." The suave Loverman persona and the rumbling flow of Jamaican patois should be familiar to anybody who's heard even one of Shaggy's hits — from "Boombastic" to "It Wasn't Me." In 1986, Shaggy left Jamaica, where he lived with his grandmother, and joined his mother, Veronica Miller, in Flatbush, a predominantly West Indian neighborhood in Brooklyn. "I was getting into a lot of trouble in my youth," he told the Guardian in 1995, "so it was decided that I would go to live with my mother for a stable upbringing."4' Shaggy was eighteen at the time, and he was already well rooted in his native culture. Speaking to a Times
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interviewer in 2001, Shaggy explained that the culture shock he faced in relocating to Flatbush was minimal: "OK, you've got the tall buildings and the cold climate — that represented the biggest shock! — b u t you've also got a familiar language, plus familiar music and food. I soon came to feel at home."47 Along with London and Toronto, Brooklyn has been the destination of choice for wave upon wave of West Indian immigrants since the 19603. After U.S. immigration laws were relaxed in 1965, Brooklyn's immigrant population swelled; people from the Caribbean, as well as Latin America and parts of Asia, made the New York borough their home. In 1969, the first West Indian American Carnival Day Parade was held on Brooklyn's Eastern Parkway. Since then, the West Indian American Carnival Day Parade has become New York's biggest parade, drawing a reported two million revelers and generating revenues of approximately two hundred million dollars.48 So the distinct Caribbean flavor that Shaggy encountered in Flatbush had been brewing for some time. Shaggy enrolled in Erasmus Hall High School — an institution with a long list of famous alumni. Built in 1787, Erasmus was America's first public school.49 Barbra Streisand graduated from there in 1959, Clive Davis, head of Arista Records, graduated in 1949, and chess champion Bobby Fischer attended before dropping out in 1960.°° But of all of Erasmus Hall's illustrious alumni, Shaggy is the only one to have achieved fame styling himself as a suave, boombastic lover lover. Karen Francis (nee Alleyne) attended Erasmus as well, and she fondly remembers Shaggy — who was then called Orville.
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Francis wasn't actually a classmate of Shaggy's; she met him through a mutual friend who happened to be "in love" with Shaggy. Although Shaggy is known for his flashy outfits and wild style, Francis recalls Orville quite differently. "I remember that he dressed pretty conservative," she says. "I remember him carrying a briefcase-type bag as his 'book bag.' He was down to earth, but he just had his own style; as far as the hip-hop look, most guys wore the usual baggy pants etc. He was more preppy, not in a nerd way, just different." Although Patricia Meschino reports that Shaggy's first performances took place in the Erasmus Hall cafeteria, where he could be found "chatting lyrics 'deejay' style . . . accompanying himself with rhythms pounded out on wooden benches,'"' Francis doesn't remember any impromptu lunchroom concerts. She does, however, recall that Orville had a certain je ne sais quoi — "He was one of the 'cute' guys." Being West Indian herself, Francis felt as comfortable going to school in Flatbush as Shaggy did. "Erasmus Hall was considered as one of the worst high schools," she says, "but I never did find out if it was referred to as being bad by education standards or crime. I attended that school, and I never had any problems whatsoever. The school was pretty much all West Indians. Maybe that is why I felt like I was home-away-fromhome being that I am originally from Barbados, West Indies. It was a pretty cultural school. One of the major things I remember about the school was outside of the school. Everyone congregated . . . admittedly in their own social groups, but there was a diversity. You had Jamaican talking to Bajan, Trinidadian with Panamanian. Erasmus Hall, like New York
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City, was a melting pot within itself." A perfect place for Jamaican-born Orville Richard Burrell to enter into the world of dancehall. By the time he reached New York, in 1986, the local dancehall culture was already twenty years old, but it was just beginning to flourish. Key distribution centers, such as Count Shelley's record store and the vp wholesale and retail centers (established by former Randy's Records moguls Vincent and Patricia Chin in 1979), supplied Jamaicans "in foreign" with all the island's hottest tunes. If you wanted a musical taste of Jamaica but didn't want to shell out the cash for the latest 453, you could check any number of sound systems playing in the New York area. One of the first immigrants to New York with a history in the Jamaican music industry, Lloyd "Bulwackie" Barnes, founded one of the city's pioneering sets in 1967. Barnes was raised on Studio One and Treasure Isle hits during the ska era, when, as he told reggae writers Ray Hurford and Colin Moore, "the sound system was the thing." Barnes voiced two songs for legendary producer Prince Buster before moving to New York. Once there, he set up his sound system in the most unlikely of places. "We used to ride the transit [with the sound] . . . We had a lot of people. Then the sound got too big. There was another sound called 'Quaker.' It was hard for a sound. You had a soul sound called 'Soul Seekers.' We all used to play together. Those days people used to come from Jamaica, would bring the latest music . . . We started to play dubplates from Treasure Isle. Different cuts. Then it became very violent, it was too much . . . I play a dance where I had to pick out bullets from the speakers. After that I decided to give it up."5^
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Forced out of the sound business in 1973, Barnes turned his sights to another area of the music industry. With Munchie Jackson, he constructed his own basement studio. Working with Jamaicans like "Mr. Rocksteady" Ken Boothe and roots singer Little Roy, Wackie mixed legendary tunes like Little Roy's "Prophecy" and "Tribal War," which had been recorded at Lee "Scratch" Perry's Black Ark Studio in Jamaica. And, working with house bands such as Wreckless Breed, the Sylvester Brothers, and Itopia, who laid down heavy roots rhythms, as well as visiting Jamaican vocalists like Horace Andy, Sugar Minott, Wayne Jarrett, and Leroy Sibbles, who contributed some of the best performances of their careers, Barnes went on to release a long catalog of outstanding vocal and dub albums, along with many killer disco 455. But the sound destined to be identified with reggae in New York was not Wackie's Lee Perry-inspired brand of roots and dub. Dancehall reggae — characterized by fast-talking deejays and sparse, pounding rhythms — had taken Jamaica by storm in the early 19808, and cassette tapes from New York-area sounds such as General High Power, Firgo Digital, King Custom, Terrorist, King Moke, African Love, and Downbeat show that New York was very much in synch with the trends being set, almost weekly, in "Yard" (Jamaica). Due to the lack of respect accorded New York-based singers and deejays, however (most were dismissed for being out of touch with the vibes of Jamaica), these New York sounds relied on guest appearances by visiting Jamaican "supas." Deejays like Brigadier Jerry, Welton Irie, Josey Wales, Chaka Demus, Shabba Ranks, Papa San, and Super Cat were often joined in rub-a-dub sessions by singers such as Sister
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Carroll, Sister Nancy, Johnny Osbourne, Courtney Melody, Frankie Paul, and Tenor Saw, who would perform live over instrumental cuts of popular dancehall rhythms. It wasn't until rapper/singer/deejay Shinehead (who joined Downbeat in 1981 before moving to Claude Evans's African Love set in 1983) hit the Brooklyn sound-system circuit that New York reggae finally started to come of age. Scoring a dancehall hit with the 1985 cover of Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean," Shinehead became the first New York-based artist to gain acceptance in Yard. In doing so, he overcame a deepseated bias against foreign-based entertainers, whom many considered short on talent and woefully out of touch with Jamaican dancehall trends. "Billie Jean" was a brilliant combination of a pop music lyric and a wildly popular — yet unrecorded — dancehall rhythm. Along with "Mama Used to Say," the flip side on the same rhythm, the single represented a New York reggae watershed. It perfectly illustrated how the music's past could be used to define its future. Although many reggae critics have identified Bumps Oakley's "A Get a Lick" as the source of the rhythm track, longtime reggae journalist and Dj Dave Kingston sees things a little differently: The "Billie Jean" riddim track was recorded by Lee Perry, with Aston "Family Man" Barrett on bass, in the late '703. It was recorded at the same session as Bob Marley's "Rainbow Country." Try playing the two tracks together and you will notice the same drum machine, same mix, et cetera. After Scratch burned down the Ark, the track was circulated by his ex-wife,
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who went to town with some of his tapes. Soundmen used the backing track in the dance to great dramatic effect . . . that drum intro alone got shouts of "Forward!" To the best of my knowledge, there was never a vocal cut over the original riddim, which was popularized in the dance by General Echo (Echophonic & Stereophonic) with his "Up Chin Cherrie / Down Chin Cherrie" lyric, until he died in March of 1980. When Shinehead put it out on the African Love label in 1985 as a twelve-inch with parts of the melody from "The Good the Bad and the Ugly" combined with the popular Michael Jackson song, it was already a familiar riddim, albeit by dance tapes as opposed to records. Oakley's "A Get a Lick" has an entirely different bass line and bridge than the "Chin Cherrie" riddim. I have been tracking down the origin of this one for years, and the closest track musically is a Lloyd Charmers-produced instrumental from 1968 called "Safari." Same key, bass line, and similar bridge. And guess who plays bass . . . Family Man! I still maintain that while the chord intervals are truly similar with the verse part of "Get a Lick," there is far more in common with "Safari" — bass line, chord intervals, major key, ascending bridge, et cetera — which in my mind makes it seem as though it was based more on "Safari." While the origins of the rhythm behind "Billie Jean" are still open to question, there's no denying the song's tremendous impact. Following up with hit singles "Know How Fi Chat,"
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"Hello Y'All" (which features Shinehead rapping in praise of Studio One over a version of Coxsone's "Lecture" rhythm), and "Who the Cap Fits," all in the same year, Shinehead quickly ascended to the top of New York's reggae world. In the process, he won recognition and respect from Yard. In 1987, on the strength of his 1986 debut album for the small African Love label, Rough and Rugged, and his video for "Chain Gang" (which was in heavy rotation on BET at the time), major label Elektra signed Shinehead. His first album for Elektra was released in 1988. Predating — or perhaps even kick-starting — the American interest in dancehall that brought Shabba Ranks (Epic/Sony), Super Cat (Columbia), Cobra (Sony/Epic), Tiger (Columbia/ Chaos), Tony Rebel (Columbia), and Shaggy (Virgin) majorlabel recording contracts, Shinehead never achieved the kind of success that Elektra had envisioned for him. Still, he was a wholly original artist who was equally at home rapping in a New York accent, chatting in Jamaican patois, singing, or whistling — all of which he could do in a single song. "Gotta Get Mine," for instance, features this versatile performer rapping, singing, and deejaying over a hip-hop beat, a combination technique that helped to break down the artificial barriers that had separated hip-hop and reggae for so long. Although it seemed to many that reggae and rap first converged around deejay Super Cat, who (after moving to New York in 1988) managed to make a major impact on the hip-hop market when his 1992 hit "Ghetto Red Hot" was remixed by dancehall/hip-hop producer and radio host Bobby Konders (and again in 1993 when he teamed up with Heavy D on "Them No Worry We"), Shinehead
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was the first to combine hip-hop flavas and Jamaican flow to such striking effect. The New York-based talent pool was growing. By the end of the 19803, the likes of Shinehead, Super Cat, Scion Sachay Success, Alton Black, Bajja Jedd, Nike Fungus, Red Fox, Sluggy Ranks, and Shaggy were mashing up New York dancehalls. Several studios and labels dedicated to releasing local product were up and running. Lloyd "Bulwackie" Barnes, who had set up the first New York reggae production studio in the mid-1970s, was joined a decade later by "Prince" Phillip Smart. A former dub engineer at King Tubby's legendary Waterhouse studio, Smart had moved to New York in 1976 and set up his HC&F recording empire in Freeport, Long Island. By the time Don and Sonia Moodie opened their Don One Recording Studios on Albemarle Avenue in Brooklyn in 1990, the city was already turning out music on a number of small labels — even if a good deal of it still featured visiting Jamaican artists. Hyman Wright and Percy Chin's Jah Life Time imprint, one of the first reggae labels to be based in the Big Apple, soon had competition. Witty's Music Master, Bobby Konders's Massive B, Super Cat's Wild Apache, Phillip Smart's Tan-Yah, Lloyd Campbell's Spiderman and Joe Frazier, and Moodie's Don One are just a few of the labels that signaled the rise of New York dancehall. Others on the scene were Barry U, Park Heights, Digital English, Roots Groundation, African Love, and Studio One, which had been operating out of New York since Coxsone Dodd left Jamaica when the digital boom hit in the mid-1980s.
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When Shaggy started deejaying in 1987, it was a good time to be a dancehall artist in the Big Apple. There were several reasons for this. New York's sound-system scene had been steadily gaining credibility throughout the 19803, due especially to Shinehead's breakthrough in 1984 and the addition of selector Baby Face to future sound-killing machine King Addies a year later; the city's reggae labels were anxious to produce local talent; and leading studios like HC&F, Don One, and Living Room were all competing to bust the next big tune. As Shaggy has told countless interviewers, however, he didn't see his early involvement in dancehall as anything more than a hobby. All he wanted was "to do nightclubs and get chicks," but his manager, Robert Livingston, had a much grander vision. As Shaggy pointed out to the New York Times, because of his manager's determination and the fact that they were in the right place at the right time, "We can pack coliseums now. And we're making our own music our own way."03 In the grand tradition of Jamaican deejays that stretches all the way back to Count Machuki in the 19503, Shaggy started off as a selector who, as he told Billboard, "just liked to buy records and spin them [in clubs]."04 His wealth of musical talent, however, led him further and further into the music business. With an ear for rhythm and rhyme, an eye for current dancehall trends, and a charismatic personality, Shaggy started off chatting lyrics in his high school cafeteria, backing himself up by pounding out rhythms on the wooden benches. It was during this time at Erasmus Hall that Shaggy met the first of several individuals who have been absolutely crucial to his enormous success.
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Shaggy's current tour manager and his former show D,T, Paul "Rossi" Lee, first met in high school. As Rossi Lee told The Beat, "Me and Shaggy became friends through a mutual school friend of ours." Soon thereafter, Rossi Lee's apartment became "DJ Central," a hangout for Brooklyn's bubbling local MCS. "We use to chat, mess around with music, and that's when we started experimenting," Lee continued in his interview with The Beat." A large part of this experimentation, Shaggy explained to the South China Morning Post, involved improvising song introductions and lyrics in the classic dancehall style. "I started chatting on the mike," Shaggy recalled, "and when I ran out of lyrics I just made stuff up off the top of my head.'"" Once Shaggy had started hanging out with Rossi Lee and deejaying on his small, Brooklyn-based Gibraltar Musik sound system, he was drawn even deeper into the reggae underground. Joining forces with the Ruff Entry Crew (which included fellow Brooklyn-based dancehall artists Bajja Jedd, Screechie Dan, Nike Fungus, Mikey Jarrett, Ian "Mr. Easy" Dyer, and Red Fox), Shaggy honed his chatting skills in the classic dancehall fashion. "I started, musically, with the Gibraltar Musik sound system in Brooklyn, New York," he told the Honolulu StarBulletin in an interview conducted just before the 2001 Billboard Music Awards. The New York dancehall scene, he continued, "has always been the main influence of my music, even though I still go back to Jamaica regularly. My relatives live there, my dad is still there.'"7 Holding the mike in rub-a-dub dancehall sessions, Shaggy traded lyrical blows with fellow dancehall deejays Bajja Jedd
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and Red Fox. Improvising original lyrics (usually based on the type of self-promotion, slack sex talk, and observations on dancehall happenings and ghetto life that were the norm at the beginning of the 19903) over version sides of booming dancehall rhythms, Shaggy began as a fast-talking, gravel-voiced shouter. Many of his early records (some of which have been collected on the Greensleeves LP Shaggy: Original Doberman) show that his style probably owed too much to the likes of Shabba Ranks, Chaka Demus, and Buju Banton to be considered wholly original. But an entirely fresh delivery has never been a strict requirement for dancehall success, and there was no denying Shaggy's energy or his presence on the mike.
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As almost any dancehall performer will be glad to tell you, music isn't usually enough to pay the bills. Shaggy, of course, was well aware of this. "At some point in your life you have to make a living — you have to be able to pay the rent," he told the Denver Westward. For a while, Shaggy even scooped ice cream at a Flatbush Baskin and Robbins store. He laughed as he recalled this low point to Singer: "It just wasn't cool looking at chicks, and trying to get chicks with an apron and a hat on saying 'Two or three scoops, please?""'' Shaggy explained to Joshua Green, "the job thing wasn't working out . . . I kept getting fired — so I checked myself into a job I couldn't get fired from.'"9 When he joined the Marines in 1988, it seemed an odd career move — to say the least — for an aspiring Jamaican dancehall deejay. Dancehall dons like Yellowman and the Lone Ranger had been performing onstage and appearing on album covers dressed in army fatigues since the early 19805, but the decision to "fight fi Uncle Sam," as Shaggy sings in "Think Ah So It Go" (from the Midnite Lover LP), still seemed to fly in the face of everything reggae stood for. After
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all, what is Babylon, if not the military forces of the most powerful country in the world? Obviously, as Shaggy told Kevin O'Hare of Newhouse News Service, the appeal of a steady paycheck wasn't the only thing that lured him into the Marines. "After being in New York for a while and seeing the game, I realized there are only a couple of ways you can go: the wrong way or the right way. I headed down the wrong way a couple of times and realized if I had stayed in New York I could have been misled in so many ways." ° Picking up on the same theme in an interview with the South China Morning Post, Shaggy remarked, "In Brooklyn, one can easily get influenced by the wrong people and wrong things. My main thing was to get out of there and the U.S. Marines was my only choice at that moment." Speaking to London's Guardian, Shaggy revealed yet another of his motivations for seeking the structured and disciplined military life: "If I was going through an alley and saw two rough tough guys, I'd have my knife on me and walk straight in there — I was that stupid. I just wanted to get off the streets. I saw a Marines uniform and thought it looked really mean. The recruiting officer sold me a bunch of bullshit and I was in." 2 Why the Marines instead of the Army or the Navy? "I saw all the other uniforms and the Marines' looked the sharpest, so I said, Til go with these guys,'" Shaggy told Corporal Barry Melton of the Marine Corps News. But although Shaggy didn't put too much thought into joining the Marines, he knew he'd be accorded respect as a member of the corps. "All I knew is they were elite and the most
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prestigious, and that's what I wanted to be. I was a little Jamaican kid. I just thought, 'Hey, nice uniform!'"'5 He didn't quite realize what he was getting into. "I swear to God I didn't know the Marines was the hardest service,"'4 he says, somewhat apologetically. He wasn't ready for the rigorous training required to become one of the "proud few." In fact, he was quite shocked by the basic training. Describing his reality check, he said to Melton: "I thought it was like a summer camp — you go away for a while, come back and go on with life. So, I took the test and I passed and off I went. When I got to the yellow footprints, it was another story. Everybody was running around, yelling, and spitting in my face. I was really surprised."'1 (Clearly, young Orville Richard Burrell had missed Stanley Kubrick's 1987 war film, Full Metal Jacket.) Although he was stationed at Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina — an eighteen-hour round-trip drive from home — Shaggy never made a clean break with the Brooklyn dancehall scene — nor the street life that came with it. He told Joshua Green that "the whole recording thing was basically a hobby back then,"'" but he still drove all the way to New York to cut dubplate specials and record tracks at Don Moodie's famous Don One studio in Brooklyn. And at New York weekend dances, he took the mike, honing his deejay skills. "I've done many shows and voiced records in my uniform," he told Billboard in August 1997." Four years later, he commented to the New York Daily News: "None of my friends were in North Carolina. I couldn't just stay there and do hillbilly music."'
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Far from wasting away in North Carolina and resigning himself to a desperate life as a hillbilly musician, Shaggy started to gain momentum during his time in the Marines. But those eighteenhour Interstate 95 road trips took their toll: Shaggy's lateness and unauthorized absences brought him unwelcome attention from his Marine superiors. As he told Melton, "I cleaned my share of toilets and stood my share of fire watches"; but, he was quick to add, "without the Marine Corps, I would never be where I am today."" (Keep in mind, however, that these comments of Shaggy's were meant for an audience of Marines.) Slowed by conflicting demands, Shaggy didn't release his first single until 1990. Produced and recorded by "Digital" Paul Henton and Don Moodie at his Albemarle Avenue studio, neither "Man a Mi Yard" nor its flip side, "Bullet Proof Buddy," made an impression on the reggae world. Still, both tunes showcased a gifted young lyricist with a knack for storytelling (reminiscent of Lieutenant Stitchie's) and a good sense of humor working well within the dancehall mode. Poking fun at his friends who "gwan like dem hard" (pretend to be bad) when they don't even run things in their own homes, "Man a Mi Yard" provides the first glimpse of what would become Shaggy's signature tongue-in-cheek style. If they take the song out of its dancehall context — in which good-natured jousting between rival deejays has enjoyed a long history — some listeners might be offended by the sexism inherent in making fun of men "living in America" who "take their order[s]" from women. When you consider that Shaggy recalls the days when he was living "inna Jamaica under the rule
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of [his] grandmother," however, and you combine this with the fact that he's making fun of those who "gwan like dem hard," it's clear that he's not making an ultrasexist statement about man's "rightful place." Rather, he's having a laugh at friends who big up their chests and act macho in public while behaving quite differently behind closed doors. Among other recordings that came out of Shaggy's weekend trips to New York is "Get Down to It," a combination tune with Rayvon on which Shaggy sounds almost identical to Buju Banton as he urges women who want "agony" (sex) to "get down to it." There's also the slack "Big Hood" and "Duppy or Uglyman," both voiced for producer Lloyd "Spiderman" Campbell. Fans interested in understanding the debt that Shaggy owes to the dancehall tradition should also check out "Kibbles and Bits" and "We Never Danced to the Rub-a-Dub Sound." The former, a celebration of Shaggy's "dogamuffin" dancehall persona, rides a cut of the "Stalag" rhythm, listed by reggae-riddims.com as the fourth most versioned rhythm in history, with at least 206 known songs. Originally an organ-based instrumental produced by Winston Riley in the 19703, "Stalag" has been versioned by almost every reggae performer to pick up a mike in the past thirty years. From Sister Nancy's "Bam Bam" and Tenor Saw's classic sound-boy burial "Ring the Alarm" to more recent reworkings, like Cocoa Tea's "We Do the Killing" and Kardinal OffishalPs "Maxine," the rhythm continues to run dancehalls from Jamaica to New York. It remains the weapon of choice for any soundman looking to flop the opposition. In similar fashion, "We Never Danced to the Rub-a-Dub Sound," another combination with Rayvon on which Shaggy's debt to Buju Banton is
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obvious, is a reworking of Slim Smith's "I'll Never Let You Go," made famous by the Lone Ranger with his "Answer" version. Like "Stalag," the "Answer" rhythm is a dancehall classic that's been giving hits to artists as diverse as Peter Metro (with "Police in Jamaica") and Bounty Killer (with "Spy Fi Die") and just about everyone in between. Perhaps the most important result of Shaggy's weekend treks from Camp Lejeune, however, was that they kept him in contact with one of the two figures (the other being manager and producer Robert Livingston) who would be instrumental in launching his groundbreaking career. Shaun "Sting International" Pizzonia, the man responsible for building the rhythms behind most of Shaggy's hits over the past decade, began as a disc jockey at New York's KISS-FM. Shaggy met him through fellow deejay Red Fox, and the two have enjoyed a long friendship and an astoundingly successful working relationship for more than ten years. Apprenticing with legendary dub engineer "Prince" Phillip Smart at his HC&F Studios on Long Island, Sting explored the production side of the music industry as well. At HC&F, he developed his skills as a studio engineer before establishing his own label, Signet (followed later by the Sting International imprint), in the early 19903. As New York would discover with the release of Shaggy's first dancehall hits, "Mampie" and "Big Up," and as the world would discover with the success of his first international smash, "Oh Carolina," Sting had a special knack for creating original rhythms that incorporated elements of old favorites. The versioning of dancehall classics — especially rhythms from Coxsone Dodd's Studio One and Duke Reid's Treasure Isle —
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has always been one of reggae's distinguishing features. But Sting seemed to have a gift for finding old rhythms that hadn't already been versioned to death and coming up with creative ways of melding these familiar elements with something new. Shaggy's first New York hit, "Mampie," a version of Jackie Mittoo's "Drum Song" rhythm, which was originally recorded for Studio One in 1967, demonstrates a fairly standard approach to rhythm building. Produced by Sting and released on Phillip Smart's Tan-Yah label in 1991, Shaggy's "Mampie" appeared (in typical dancehall fashion) among a flood of other versions. These included Dirtsman's masterpiece of self-promotion, "Hot This Year," fast-talking deejay Papa San's "Run the Route," as well as "Pose Off," from fellow Ruff Entry Crew members Screechie Dan and Red Fox. Again, the extent to which Shaggy was — at least at the outset of his career — operating within the conventions of the dancehall is obvious. Not only was he releasing material that was (through its debt to foundation labels like Studio One) strictly reggae, but he was also cutting versions of popular dancehall rhythms, performing at dancehall clubs with other artists on the rise, recording exclusive dubplates at studios like Don One, drawing inspiration from dancehall dons like Shabba Ranks and Buju Banton, and achieving local success in the process. With the release of "Big Up," however — a hit in New York and Jamaica — Shaggy showed that he was capable of reaching an audience far beyond the Brooklyn dancehall circuit. Providing an even better example of Sting's approach to building rhythms, "Big Up" is based on a sample familiar to dancehall and pop fans alike: Bob Marley's "Could You Be Loved." Released along
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with versions by Screechie Dan ("Skin Out") and Terror Fabulous ("Wedding Ring"), "Big Up" featured Shaggy in yet another combination with Brooklyn-based singer Rayvon. In his characteristic rumble, he delivers a fresh verbal assault, this time in praise of "all dem a woman dem." Combining familiar elements of the Marley song with the type of bass-heavy, thumping rhythm that was popular both in Yard and on the Brooklyn sound-system circuit in the early 19903, "Big Up" managed to catch the ears of people both inside and outside the reggae ghetto. Yet, as Shaggy told Patricia Meschino, his early success was due to more than just creative production and energetic toasting. "It was a challenge for a New York artist to get a hit anywhere in America because Jamaica is the core where the music comes from. The radio deejays would normally be looking for the songs that came out on seven-inch out of JA [Jamaica]; they weren't paying attention to New York artists, so that in itself was a struggle. What gave us a little leverage, Dahved Levy [a popular radio personality] was on KISS-FM and Sting was the deejay on the show and he played our songs; the opportunity to play the local stuff on a major station like KISS-FM was a big plus for us."7° Basking in the glow of his first local breakthroughs, however, was not a luxury Shaggy could afford. He was still a Marine, and soon after the Gulf War started, in January of 1991, he was dispatched to Iraq. In an instant, his focus shifted from chatting on the mike at a New York dancehall to battling Saddam Hussein under the hot desert sun.
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As he has confessed to interviewers, Shaggy was naive about what he was getting into when he joined the Marines; and when the time came to fight in a real war, he was unprepared. "Some people do twenty years in the military and never see a day of combat," he explained to Joshua Green of the Denver Westward. "I did four and got sent off to war. It's just destiny, I guess."7' The path that Shaggy followed from Jamaica to New York to the Persian Gulf may have been the path of destiny, but not because he was fated to become a military hero. He confided to the Los Angeles Daily News, "Basically, I counted shells and dug holes. I wasn't Chuck Norris."7" To the Guardian's John Aizlewood, he explained that he was "a skater. In military terms that means you don't do shit — you skate out of everything. If a commanding officer came by I'd act like I was working, but I just sat in my Jeep and put my feet up. Jesus, they expected me to guard my post at 3 a.m. Who the hell was gonna come for us in the middle of the goddamn night? Man, I was the worst Marine."" In spite of this lack of enthusiasm for life in the armed forces, Shaggy acknowledges that the experience did shape his character
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in positive ways. Reflecting on his five months spent loading howitzers as a member of the Fifth Battalion, Tenth Marine Regiment's artillery support for frontline personnel, Shaggy describes it as "a rude awakening." "It taught me a lot about myself," he told the Guardian three years after he was discharged. "In normal circumstances, if it's too hot, you just turn up the air-conditioning. And if it's too cold, you crank up the heating. But what do you do when you're stuck in a baking desert as all around you, oil wells are burning. From my time in the Marines I learned how to cope with difficult situations. I wasn't caught up in the politics of the process, I was just there doing my job. But if I could, or had to, I guess that I would do it all over again. It kept me from becoming just another black statistic."74 While Shaggy concedes that "there were some aspects of the military which shaped [his] character into what it is today," he's quick to note that life in the Marines did not have much of an effect on his music. As he told the Times in the spring of 2001, "I can't say it had any influence on me creatively . . . Not in any positive way . . . I was trying to work on my music during the time that I was serving, but no one above me had any interest in what lay behind the uniform and the pair of boots."75 Still, perhaps in an effort to be diplomatic, Shaggy does give some credit to Marine drill work for honing his roughhouse deejay voice. As Bob Timm of about.com explains, "during basic training, he was selected to bark out chants for drills, entertaining his fellow soldiers with his quick wit and booming voice."7 Shaggy didn't just squander his time making up dirty lyrics to old marching standards —- his funny refrains were a form of voice training. "Little did I know at that time," he told Seventeen magazine.77
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You can hear the results of this training in his early tunes. The voice that delivers "Big Up" and "Mampie" hardly sounds like the boombastic voice on "It Wasn't Me." Shaggy's Marine-influenced baritone — marked by the gruff, deep, cartoon-style rumble that's come to be his calling card — first surfaced on his 1992 version of "Oh Carolina." While Shaggy's superior officers may not have offered him their support for his music career, a number of his fellow soldiers backed him all the way. "It took us all by surprise when we heard him on the radio," recalls Sergeant Stephen Torruella, one of Shaggy's ex-roommates. "We were like, 'No, this can't be who we're listening to right now!" Speaking to Singer magazine, Torruella adds that Shaggy "always made his presence known — that he was a superstar. He was already acting the part . . . He pretty much said he could see himself superseding what they could offer him here [in the military] . . . Plus he wasn't going to let the military's idealism hold him down, compared to what he knows he's capable of doing and what he plans on doing. Shaggy practiced his music anywhere that he could. That was one thing he promised he was going to do."7'' Although Shaggy's voice may have benefited from calling cadence in the Marines, there's no question that he came of age as a vocalist during his weekend trips to New York. As he told the Denver Westword, he was riding in an Army Jeep in Kuwait when one of his early hits — recorded on a weekend trip to Brooklyn — came blasting over the radio. "There's a radio station that's broadcast from London that's so powerful you can pick it up from Kuwait," he recalled. "They were broadcasting a
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reggae show that only played underground reggae hits, and mine just happened to be one of them."79 Unfortunately, as Shaggy learned upon his discharge from the Marines, dancehall reggae hits — which sell in the thousands as opposed to the millions — don't usually generate enough cash to pay the bills. "Here I was, from Flatbush, with two dancehall tunes running New York," he told the Virginian-Pilot, "but I could only play the Q club, Albany Ballroom, etc. You might make $2,000 or $3,000 at those venues, but that's all."80 Having emerged from the Marines with a newfound discipline and determination — not to mention a keen awareness of the fragility of life and the horrors of war — Shaggy started to take his life and his music more seriously. "It's just one of those things that certainly shape your character," he told Ebony magazine, speaking of his time in the Persian Gulf. "When I enlisted in the military, I knew music was my life. Through that war experience I discovered that you take many things for granted and you don't know what you have until you lose it. And while I was there in the Persian Gulf, I realized I had to start living, because this life could just slip away from you." ' Having witnessed the horrors of war more closely than most people, it is not surprising that Shaggy has such strong opinions on the matter. "War is ugly," he told Africa News, echoing the words expressed by several generations of Jamaican deejays. "It had a big impact on me, in terms of appreciating life. When I got out I decided, 'This is it, I'm taking my music to the heights.'""
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The heights that Shaggy had in mind were not visible — or attainable — from his base in North Carolina, so he returned to New York soon after his discharge. Back in the Big Apple, he reconnected with mix-master Sting International. The creative Dj-turned-producer had an insider's understanding of how to get Shaggy's music onto the radio and into the larger markets. As Shaggy told the Germaica Observer, "The producer who has always been responsible for my success, who did 'Oh Carolina,' 'Boombastic,' 'That Girl,' is Sting International." ! Like his first two dancehall hits, "Mampie" and "Big Up," Shaggy's "Oh Carolina" was a version of an old reggae classic. And, once again, Sting International produced the rhythm track. Rather than plundering the archives of Studio One or turning to Bob Marley rhythms for inspiration, Sting dug deep into Jamaican music history for "Oh Carolina," reworking a longignored classic. "Oh Carolina" was originally recorded by the Folkes Brothers for legendary soundman and producer Prince Buster in 1959, and its rhythm had only been versioned a couple of times before Shaggy's chart-topping version came out. Producer Alvin Ranglin had recorded "Man from Carolina" over the same rhythm with his session band, the GG All Stars, in 1970; and later in the same decade roots singer extraordinaire Junior Byles voiced his own version. In spite of the fact that the Prince Buster original had been a favorite of the Peacemaker sound system when Shaggy was growing up, the song had never been refashioned in a dancehall style. As Shaggy pointed out to reggae journalist Chuck Foster, however, the decision to version "Oh Carolina" wasn't based on any
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type of strategic analysis. "It wasn't like I planned to remake this record," he insists. "Sting came up with the Peter Gunn sample [a riff that snakes through the entire track] and the first thing that came to my mind was 'Oh Carolina' and part of the melody. The lyrical content [of the Shaggy version] is totally original. We didn't expect any major success from it but it came and I obviously welcomed it."4 "God knows why nobody did it," Shaggy told the Virginian-Pilot two years after the release of "Oh Carolina," the song that put his name on the pop music map. "Some people can do a classic and bring it off, and some can't. It's like 'In the Summertime.' A lot of people were scared to touch it. I touch it and I goes straight into the Top Five." 5 While in retrospect it may seem strange that a classic like "Oh Carolina" wasn't given a dancehall updating until 1992, it's worth remembering that the vast majority of rhythms coming out of New York and Jamaica at the time were — like Shaggy's "Big Up" — harder, faster, and rougher. The trend in the dance was not, as "Oh Carolina" might suggest, towards slow, winding reggae grooves. Top labels like Donovan Germain's Penthouse, Sly & Robbie's Taxi, and (perhaps most prominently) Dave "Rude Boy" Kelly's newly formed Mad House imprint were increasingly turning out rhythms that were reduced to raw drum and bass. Coming out in 1992 — the same year "Oh Carolina" was produced — Buju Banton's massive "Big It Up" (produced by Kelly for Mad House) is a perfect example of the other end of the production spectrum.
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Shaggy explained to Kronick magazine, "I don't ride the same riddim [as other dancehall performers], and I always do something left-field. Remember when 'Carolina' came out, I was doin' 'Big Up' and all o' dem big tunes and shit. And I had to switch. I said, 'Yo, Carolina,' and muh'fuckas was tellin' me, 'What the fuck is this?!' You can't say that was authentic Reggae, but Reggae muh'fuckas ate it up. Dancehall Niggas ate it up. When I came with tunes like 'Boombastic,' that was no authentic Reggae shit. That was some shit that was some different shit, but they ate it up! 'That Girl' wasn't no traditional Reggae and I ain't doin' nothin' different than the same left-field shit. And I still got the balls to do it and don't give a fuck what nobody say. Let me tell you about a Hit record: when a record don't Hit, everybody got something to say. When it Hits, everybody's on that muh'fucka! Shit don't happen, everybody sayin', 'Man, I told you that shit was wack.'"" Originally released on Sting's Signet label and accompanied by versions from Bajja Jedd ("Bedwork Sensation"), Daddy Syva ("Goody Body"), Nike Fungus ("Zig Zag Stitch"), and Rayvon ("Rivers of Babylon"), Shaggy's "Oh Carolina" — like Prince Buster's original — was an instant favorite. As Buster told Lloyd Bradley in a recent interview for the BBC, "When I first put ["Oh Carolina"] on my sound system and the sound of those drums went up in the air, people came running . . . this was the sound of poor black Jamaica.""7 If the mammoth success of Shaggy's version is any indication, then the "sound of poor black Jamaica" was starting to resonate throughout the world. Shaggy told the Marine Corps News, "I released the record on my own and I had a buddy who was a [disc jockey]. He played it on the
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radio and people loved it. It got bigger through people telling their friends about it, and before I knew it, it was a hit."88 Not only was the slow groove of "Oh Carolina" popular on local radio and in New York's dancehalls, but it also made an impact in Jamaica, spawning a full album's worth of versions produced by King Jammy and collected on a 1993 vp compilation called Carolina My Darling. Among the versions were Bounty Killer's "New Things a Wear" and "Slow Butterfly," Brian and Tony Gold's take on the title track, and Admiral Bailey's "Can't Keep a Good Man Down." But the wave created by "Oh Carolina" didn't stop at Jamaica's shores. The song topped the New York reggae charts and was picked up by Greensleeves (a well-respected U.K. reggae label) at the end of 1992 and released in the United Kingdom. There it held for sixteen weeks at the top of the reggae charts before crossing over to the pop charts, where it reached number one as well. When all was said and done, the single proved to be the fastest-selling record in U.K. history and the first reggae number one since rocksteady singer Ken Boothe's "Everything I Own" grabbed the spot in 1971. As if this weren't enough, the song also made a major mark in Japan, continental Europe, and South Africa, holding down the number-one spot in nine countries. Although it never did quite as well in the U.S., where a copyright dispute delayed its release, the song received huge exposure when it was included on the soundtrack for the suspense thriller Sliver, starring Sharon Stone. There was no denying the impact of "Oh Carolina." As Shaggy told Chuck Foster, "We definitely kicked something off, some sort of revolution or whatever.""9
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Having achieved both local and international acclaim through collaborations with Sting International, it was clear that Shaggy had found a winning formula. But another type of force was needed to take Shaggy's music — which was still firmly grounded in the insular dancehall tradition — out of the reggae ghetto and onto the world stage. Robert Livingston, a transplanted Jamaican living in New York, was the first to recognize Shaggy's enormous commercial potential, and he wasted little time cashing in. By the time Livingston assumed control of Shaggy's career in 1993, he had already enjoyed a long and successful history in the reggae industry. This included working with reggae legends such as Dennis Brown, Gregory Isaacs, Frankie Paul, and Culture. More recently he had been managing Super Cat, one of the first deejays to sign a deal with a major label. Although Cat's Don Dada failed to achieve the kind of commercial success that Columbia had in mind, the deejay made major inroads into the vast American market. But working with Super Cat, an artist whose bad-boy stage persona was mirrored in real life, proved to be more difficult than Livingston could have predicted. Not only
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did Livingston have trouble marketing Super Cat to an American audience (to whom dancehall was still very foreign), but the deejay was also known for his "extreme unwillingness to play along with label politics." "Working with Super Cat was a very good experience," Livingston explained in a recent interview, "but it was also a struggle, fighting with someone who didn't actually believe in what he was doing."90 Shaggy, on the other hand, did believe in what he was doing, and Livingston was able to provide just the type of help required to exploit the momentum of "Oh Carolina's" success. Like Shaggy, Livingston "is a product of the streets," though, as Shaggy told the Guardian, "he's not Mafia or don-connected. He's just a stern person and a very good businessman""1 — just the qualities needed by an artist starting out in an exploitative industry. Perhaps more importantly, as Shaggy put it, "Robert had a vision." "I just wanted to do nightclubs and get chicks," Shaggy confessed to Robbie Woliver of the New York Times, but Livingston was thinking big. "We've all weathered serious storms, fistfights, rows and lots of drama," Shaggy says. "But we've all come together because we know we have a formula that works.""2 Again, in an acceptance speech he delivered at the Caribbean Music Expo awards dinner (held at the Renaissance Jamaica Grande in Ocho Rios), Shaggy expressed his massive debt to Livingston: "We start dis ting from scratch," he said, "Robert Livingston bway. It is not the smoothest of relationships. We cuss an' fight every day, but at the end of the day we have the same goal. Mi couldn' dweet widdout yu an mi wouldn' want no odda partner.'"3
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Seizing the reins of Shaggy's career, Livingston took "Oh Carolina" — and its singer — to England. In addition to securing a deal with Greensleeves to release the single in the U.K., Livingston arranged for Shaggy to tour with heavyweight reggae-pop star Maxi Priest. Born Max Elliott to Jamaican parents who had immigrated to England in the 19505, Maxi Priest got his start in the reggae business as a carpenter. He built the giant speaker cabinets — referred to as "houses of joy" — for London's Saxon International sound system. With a sweet voice and a pile of fresh lyrics, it wasn't long before Maxi started singing live on the set, polishing his skills in the usual dancehall fashion. But the dancehall wasn't the only place he made his mark. Teaming up with Jamaica's ruling drum and bass combo, Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, for his 1987 debut album, Maxi, the singer's take on Cat Stevens's "Wild World," along with "Some Guys Have All the Luck," brought him worldwide recognition. By the time "Close to You" (again done with Sly & Robbie) reached top spot on the U.S. Billboard charts, he had already become one of the U.K.'s best-loved singers.""1 His career a testament to the commercial viability of reggae music, Maxi Priest was both an inspiration and a role model to the young Shaggy. Almost a decade after touring with Maxi Priest, Shaggy told the Guardian that the tour had been "the turning point. I saw 30,000 people who didn't speak English singing along with his version of 'Wild World' and I knew that's what I wanted. Maxi was criticized because he had this pop element, [but he] had seen the bigger picture and wanted it. Bob Marley was criticized for the same thing, and so am I right now."'1
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"I said to myself, 'Hold on, this is what me want!'" Shaggy explained to Billboard magazine in 1997. '"This is longevity, this is a career!' And guess what, I don't hear a Maxi Priest tune in a dancehall. Is it about recognition from your friend them — 'Yes boss, I buy your record' — or about getting it from the world and making an actual mark on this music? Bob Marley was never recognized at home. And when I started to get big, nobody accepted me in Jamaica. I struggled on every stage show there."9 Not only did Shaggy's early performances in Jamaica bring their share of trials and tribulations, but his working relationship with manager and partner Robert Livingston — especially at the beginning of his career — also created a lot of friction. While acknowledging the important things his manager has done for him, Shaggy described the nature of the friction to rudegal.com: "He's been the biggest inspiration for me as far as telling me a lot of things. He used to tell me stuff and I'd be like what the fuck is wrong with this idiot? Now I've been through it and I'm like damn, he was giving me some good advice. A lot of things in the earlier albums Robert called a lot of the shots. Because honestly, I didn't know what the fuck I was doing. I was going 'Yo, we're going to England to chart this record — WHAT THE FUCK is CHART?!!' I've never even traveled to England, what the fuck are you telling me? We'd take buses and trains and go promote the records. I stood in the place one night and cussed like hell because I was sitting on a stool singing to 10 people in some friggin club. I turned and walked off the stage and was like FUCK THIS SHIT, I ain't doing this shit! And Robert was like, Yo — you gotta do the show still. And 10 friggin' people. Give them people back their money! But, you had to do the song and you learn to do that."97
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Fortunately, Shaggy's hard work coupled with Livingston's good business sense paid off quickly. On the strength of "Oh Carolina," Virgin Records signed Shaggy. At the time, the multialbum pact — worth 1.5 million pounds — was the richest deal ever offered to a reggae performer. It was a revelation to Shaggy. He told the Rocky Mountain News, "When ['Oh Carolina'] went to number one on the reggae charts and the big companies started shoving deals down my throat, I figured, 'I guess I've got a career now.'""'' One of only a handful of reggae acts with a major-label recording contract, Shaggy certainly did have a career. But, as he explained to Elena Oumano, it's been an uphill battle since the start. Recalling his early days with Virgin, he said, "a lot of people didn't come aboard . . . because we [reggae artists] screwed ourselves as far as this music is concerned. Almost everybody in reggae who has gotten a break has abused it. They get a hit record and they're supposed to do promotion, but they say, 'Man, me nuh gwan do promotion, me gwan roll a spliff.' Or when that one tune goes up on the charts, they're a megastar overnight and start treating people around them like shit, and they just kill their whole self. So you know what? The record companies are not going to invest money in an act that's not going to go the whole way. You gotta do the mileage.""" According to Clyde McKenzie of Shocking Vibes Records (Patrick Roberts's independent Jamaican label, best known for its long association with Beenie Man), the lack of professionalism demonstrated by many of the first artists to land major-label deals was just one of the reasons Shaggy was initially greeted with
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skepticism by Virgin executives. "In addition to wanting people who have the ability to sell records plus a combination of talent and the willingness to push himself, or herself," he commented to the Jamaica Gleaner, "the [major-label] company wants a proper management structure in place. They want to ensure that from time to time the problems which will be encountered by the artiste, or the problems he causes, will be dealt with appropriately without embarrassment to the major label." It was lucky for Shaggy that he had this "proper management structure," in the form of Robert Livingston. That relationship would be crucial to his major market success. McKenzie explained that many early deals were "thwarted" because management "was not up to par in people skills." But with Livingston in charge, Shaggy could keep the label happy and the deal in place. °° Described by Gary Ashley, senior vice-president of A&R at MCA Records (Shaggy's current label), as the "hardest working man in show business,"'0' there's no questioning the stellar reputation that Shaggy has gained in the industry. "He has the best work ethic I have seen. He never says no and he's always ready to go out there and make something happen," Ashley told the Gleaner in March 2001. "Sometimes we as a company have to sit down and decide to stop working him so hard. But he's so willing and he loves it." As MCA'S Ashley explains, it was the professionalism of the Shaggy-Sting-Livingston unit that convinced the label to sign the deejay in the first place. "They know what they are doing," Ashley says of the trio. "Every record company wants to work in that kind of situation. People ask about why more Jamaican acts are not signed to MCA. We'd
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sign anybody if they have the right work ethic and are willing to work professionally."'" Master T, a longtime vj on MuchMusic (Canada's answer to MTV), has arguably done more to promote urban music — and especially reggae — in Canada than anyone else. In his autobiography, Master T: One VJ's Journey, he remarks that the professionalism and class displayed by Shaggy's organization were the key to winning the support of skeptical network executives and opening doors for reggae in Canada. The first reggae artist to appear on MuchMusic's Intimate and Interactive, Master T fondly remembers several of Shaggy's appearances at the station over the years. "I hold a close place in my vj heart for Shaggy. Leading up to his [first MuchMusic] performance, the whispers around the Much building implied that he was a onehit wonder, which made me realize that reggae music was still not getting the respect it deserved." But, "by the time Shaggy and his Big Yard camp (comprised of Rayvon, Rik Rok, Tony and Brian Gold) launched into their rehearsal session, it made believers out of everybody. These cats had a tight band and an even tighter group of backup vocalists and dancers. In fact, just minutes before Shaggy's set I told him that a lot of folks at the network didn't believe in this music and that he had to recognize the significance of this show from my standpoint as a reggae booster. The rest, as they say, is history. His set was one of the most engaging I&I had ever been a part of.""5 Not only did Shaggy have the talent to wow everybody at MuchMusic that day, but he also had the intelligence and the business smarts to realize that talent alone would never be
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enough to take him to the top of the pop charts. "These artists," he said, talking to rudegal.com about his dancehall bredren, "if they are aspiring to do what I do, there are a couple of things you're gonna have to do. First of all, you got to be disciplined in this work. You gotta work your ass off. There's more work in this game than anything else!!!! You gotta be able to do shows for FREE. A lot of them won't do that. None of them I know will do that! You gotta humble yourself. That's the first thing. Jamaica, it's a small island where you get one record and they put you on a pedestal like you're fucking Liberace. Outside of that Norman Manley Airport, nobody knows who the fuck you are — so you better realize that shit. Get off that ego trip and come back down to earth and start working it. You gotta be nice to people. A lot of these people got better things to do here than fuck with you being an asshole." In the same interview, Shaggy reflected further: "How I look at it is this, I try to motivate people to wanna work with me. You know what I'm saying? I make them feel like it's a part of what I'm doing cuz really I need them! There's no way I could do all of this by myself. I need them! None of this shit that happens, all I do is make the record and go out and do my thing — that's required of me. I don't even like half of the shit I do ... I enjoy writing. I enjoy performing. I enjoy chilling in Jamaica and relaxing on a vacation here and there, not doing a fucking thing. There ain't shit else I like to do. As much as I love my kids, I play with them for an hour or two hours and I'm tired of them. I'm like — get out. That's the bottom line. I like to make music. I like to write music. There are just certain things I like to do. But there are not a lot of things — my life is boring. You know I do videos — I hate
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videos. I do photo shoots — I hate photo shoots. I do interviews — I don't particularly like the interviews. I do, whatever I do — I do it at the best of my abilities. Whatever I do, I'm good at it and I excel at it, but I don't necessarily like it. They're gonna have to be able to do that also, sacrifice to do that." As the interview went on, Shaggy continued to give readers a rare glimpse of the man behind the public persona. "It's cool if you want to get mad or whatever, as long as you do it. I get mad as a mother-fucker but I still do my job. I'll be like "Oh man, I gotta go and do BET — fucking BET, I don't give a fuck about it. Fuck shit, I don't want to do it.' You come here and they are all like 'Hey Shaggy, you're gonna be that?' and you're like 'Yeah, what's up — all smiles and laughs. It's almost like playing hypocrite at the end of the day, but you gotta get the job done. My paycheck depends on it, Robert's, Lillian [MCA'S in-house publicist], it's for them. If we don't sell records, they don't have a job. It's not just me, it's a lot of other artists. But at the end of the day it's still the same. My job is to make [the publicist's] job easy. My job is to come in here and charm — when she gets me a TV show I do that shit so good and charm all these people that the next time she calls they go, 'Oh Shaggy — no-brainer.' To be such an asset that when they call to get another artist on they're like, 'Well, we want Shaggy, if you get us Shaggy ra ra ra — okay we can work that out.' It's all about bargaining power."'04 If his uniformly positive press clippings are any indication, Shaggy's been able to charm just about everybody who's had the pleasure of working with him. In an article for Echoes magazine, reggae writer John Masouri articulates what seems to be the
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media consensus on Brooklyn's newest hotshot: he's "the same friendly, astute and unassuming guy of old, and with none of the airs and graces you associate with celebrity status."'00 Touring with Maxi Priest in 1992, performing alongside the Backstreet Boys in England the same year, and releasing Pure Pleasure, his debut album on Virgin Records, in 1993, Shaggy's early career provided a wealth of opportunities for the young star to polish his slick media persona. Yet, as he told Elena Oumano, his music — at least in terms of songwriting — was still decidedly raw. "I never wrote lyrics until the Boombastic album. Pure Pleasure was made up on the spot. 'Oh Carolina' was off the top of my head. It's better now that I'm concentrating and writing properly."'° As these comments indicate — and as listening to Pure Pleasure confirms — Shaggy's first album was very much within the dancehall mode. Produced by Robert Livingston and Sting International, the album was recorded jointly at New York's INS studio and at Phillip Smart's HC&F studio in Long Island. In addition to "Oh Carolina" and its "Raas Bumba Claat" version side, Pure Pleasure features Shaggy's first dancehall hits, "Mampie" and "Big Up." As if this weren't enough to confirm the powerful dancehall flavor, the album also contains "Give Thanks and Praise," a deejay version of Bunny Lee's classic "Conversation" rhythm; "Tek Set," a slow dancehall rhythm on which Shaggy's debt to Lieutenant Stitchie (this time through the imitation of women's voices) is obvious; as well as "Bow Wow" and "Love How Them Flex," both based on rapid-fire dancehall rhythms and energetic toasting.
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With the possible exception of the rock guitar intro to "Love How Them Flex" and the swinging jazz beat behind "Nice and Lovely" (yet another combination with Ray von), little was done by way of production to "Shaggatize" Pure Pleasure for massmarket consumption. Unlike most of Shaggy's later work, Pure Pleasure contains Jamaican patois lyrics that are indecipherable to the untrained ear; the rhythms are, for the most part, aggressive and pounding; and the subject matter seems more suited to a Brooklyn dancehall than MTV. In recent interviews, Shaggy has described his aversion to rapping about politics, religion, and "reality" issues, but Pure Pleasure features both religious and social commentary (along with the usual sexual braggadocio and slack humor that you'd expect to hear from almost any modernday dancehall deejay). "Give Thanks and Praise," for instance, deplores the proliferation of nuclear weapons, rails against the conditions that create poverty and starvation, and speaks of the oppression of the ghetto "youthman." All listeners are urged, in the classic dancehall mode, to clean up their hearts and give thanks and praise to "earth's rightful ruler." In "It Bun Me," the album's other "reality" tune, Shaggy vents his frustration at seeing his fellow ghetto youth locked up behind bars. Clearly, as Shaggy's comments to Simon Button in May 2001 indicate, his early recordings were not made with the listeners of contemporary hit radio (such as BBC'S Radio One) in mind. "When I write a song, I look at things that might touch home, that anyone can relate to ... I could write about religion or politics, but not everyone wants to hear about that stuff. When I target the singles market, I sit down and think about the buying public — kids. And kids are into sex, drugs, and computer
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games, but sex is the main thing. I don't want to talk about drugs in my songs."'07 As Shaggy elaborated in a 2001 interview with Rebecca Paton, a reporter for the New Zealand magazine Tearaway, "I don't like politics . . . I don't mix politics and music because I think that music should be entertaining. My personal views that I'm giving you here are my personal views — I don't want to put these views on records because I'm an entertainer — I go on stage and I'm there to make people smile. I'm not here to preach. I talk about social issues but that's about it." To Button, Shaggy had suggested that his choice of lyrics was determined at least partially by marketing considerations, but he told Paton the opposite. "I don't make music with an age group in mind," he said. "I make it to where I like it — however I feel. I make music to what I can relate to as a thirty-three-year-old person. I don't market myself — you don't see me lifting weights and baring myself and trying to put on muscle like I'm in GQ or something. I just make songs rather selfishly — and if they connect, they connect... I don't make it for any particular demographic," he continued, again contradicting what he'd told Button just a few months prior. "I make it to where I might like it — that's my vibe. Maybe my next album I'll feel like writing something deep — if it "connects, it connects. But the record companies don't want me to get into all that — they want me to repeat the same shit over again and I don't want to do that."'08 It's evident that in spite of Shaggy's claim that his music is artistically autonomous, it's not. Just as dancehall music — focusing on sex, religion, social issues, and the dancehall itself — is
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made to appeal to dance fans, pop music is engineered to please the widest possible audience. So why does Shaggy's debut album, Pure Pleasure, appear to be aimed at the core market of dancehall fans? As Ashley Newton, the Virgin executive who originally signed Shaggy in 1993, hinted, reggae's potential to cross over into the pop market in a relatively unadulterated form was thought to be much greater during the reggae boom of the early 19905. In 1993, Newton remarked to Billboard that in the U.S. "Reggae has gone through the roof over the last year" and that it was set to do the same in the U.K. She was alluding to the success of Chaka Demus and Pliers's 1992 crossover hit for Sly & Robbie, "Murder She Wrote"; Mad Cobra's "Flex," which topped the U.S. pop charts the same year ("Girl, flex / Time to have sex / Long time you have the rudeboy sweat," he toasts over a cut of the rhythm made famous by Buju Banton's violently antigay "Boom Bye Bye"); Snow's "Informer," which was a massive hit in North America and the U.K. a year later; and Shaggy's "Oh Carolina." Of Pure Pleasure, Newton said, "This is the new, radio-friendly Ragga style . . . it's gentle, fun."'"' Whatever the reasons for the powerful dancehall flavor of Pure Pleasure, the album did not rise to the level of success that Virgin had anticipated. Following the enormous hit "Oh Carolina" with "Close to You," a combination with Maxi Priest that snared the top spot on the U.S. charts, Shaggy still had Radio One listeners grooving to his party vibe. But the song did not appear on Pure Pleasure. Instead, "Soon Be Done" was selected as the album's follow-up single. Climbing only as high
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as number forty-six on the British pop charts, the playful reggae track "was not given any love," as Shaggy put it to the Guardian. And the album's third single, "Nice and Lovely," yet another combination with Rayvon, wasn't treated any better. "I had to make a record that was not only bigger than 'Oh Carolina' but one I wrote myself," Shaggy added, speculating on why it took two years for him to return to the top of the pops. But, he concluded, "it was never a problem because I knew I was making musical history.""0
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Released
by Virgin in 1995, Shaggy's second album,
Boombastic, formed the next chapter in his musical history. Having gained invaluable exposure when "Oh Carolina" was picked up for the Sliver soundtrack, Shaggy launched Boombastic with the help of a similar vehicle. This time, however, the medium that brought Shaggy into the spotlight wasn't film but TV advertising. Following in the footsteps of grunge band Stiltskin and retro funk group Freak Power, two outfits that received a big boost when Levi Strauss used their songs ("Inside" and "Tune in, Turn on, Cop Out," respectively) to advertise jeans, Shaggy arranged a similar deal with the jeans manufacturer. "We did the single ['Boombastic'] in May 1994," he explained to the South China Morning Post, and Levi Strauss "came in the following February and asked whether they could have the single for the ad. I previewed the ad and it's good, so I said: 'Of course.'""' While Stiltskin and Freak Power faded into obscurity almost as quickly as they had emerged from it, Shaggy used the exposure to launch his biggest hit to date. He described it as "a gamble
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you have to take." Speaking to the Guardian, he defended his decision to do the commercial: "I defy any artist to turn down a high-profile company such as Levi's. Anyway, if you follow it up with a string of successful singles, who cares?""" Set to the suave groove of Shaggy's boastful "Boombastic" — a tune made radiofriendly by its use of rock guitar — the ad succeeded in raising the profiles of both the jeans company and the artist. As it turns out, providing the music for an amusing and successful claymation commercial (in which the hero rescues his angel from a burning building) was just what Shaggy needed to launch his follow-up effort. By September 23,1995, "Boombastic" had risen to the top of the U.K. pop charts, shoving aside Michael Jackson's "You Are Not Alone" to take the number-one spot. To nobody's surprise, the tune — aided by a sample from Marvin Gaye's lovers' anthem "Let's Get It On" — also hit big in North America. Boombastic's platinum-certified title track broke down any remaining boundaries for reggae in North America. It became the top-selling single and the number-three hit on Billboard's Hot 100 Singles chart. As if that weren't enough, the song also topped Billboard's reggae, R&B, and rap charts. Trying to account for the song's success, Shaggy told the Virginian-Pilot that "Boombastic" has a "serious hook." "It's not very predictable," he added. "I'm not playing it safe. It's a very unusual reggae song, with or without the sample. And America is the other place the remix hit, really. So I think that shows that it's a very strong song.""'1 Not only was "Boombastic" a very strong single, but the album by the same name was just as solid. When all was said and done,
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Shaggy's second album for Virgin reached platinum status in the U.S. and sold more than a million copies outside America as well. In 1996, Shaggy was rewarded for his massive success when Boombastic received the Grammy Award for Best Reggae Album. Like Pure Pleasure, Boombastic was not the work of Mr. Lover Lover alone. As he has repeatedly pointed out, "I look at Shaggy almost like a band, but I'm just the front man. The rest of the people around me make it all work. I might have these visions in my head, but there are people around that help me.""4 In addition to rhythm creator and mix-master Sting International, Shaggy enlisted the help of Robert Livingston (who receives songwriting credits on all but five of the album's fourteen tracks), guest producer Tony "CD" Kelly (who built the hip-hop-flavored rhythm behind "Something Different" as well as the harder dancehall beat behind "How Much More"), and masterful Jamaican engineers Lynford "Fatta" Marshall and Colyn "Bulby" York (best known for their cutting-edge dancehall productions that appear on the Fat Eyes label; the two are among the few Jamaican producers currently releasing dub versions on the flip sides of new 45s). Recorded jointly at producer Augustus "Gussie" Clarke's ranking Music Works Studio in Kingston, Jamaica, and Phillip Smart's HC&F studio in New York, the album combines a distinct Caribbean vibe with a pop sensibility. This is perhaps best exemplified by the record's second major hit, a deejay version of Mungo Jerry's "In the Summertime." Even before Shaggy treated the song to an infectious dancehallstyle workout, Mungo Jerry's 1970 hit had already sold a staggering twenty-three million copies worldwide. Still, Shaggy
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wasn't convinced that a reggae version would drop. "It was ray manager's idea," he told the Scottish Daily Record, providing a little insight into the democratic workings of the Shaggy organization, "but, once we started recording, I began to come round." Still, he added, "It wasn't until the vocals were laid down that I started to feel sure.""0 Shaggy had already seen, with "Oh Carolina," that dancehall deejaying and a catchy, happy melody (even one taken from a reggae classic) could produce a huge commercial success, so he took "In the Summertime" one step further. Rather than versioning a reggae standard (in keeping with the dancehall tradition that goes all the way back to U-Roy in the 19703), Shaggy's crew — brilliantly led by Robert Livingston — created a deejay version of one of the biggest singles in pop music history. Mungo Jerry's original is instantly recognizable; it was a perfect choice for introducing dancehall deejaying to the world. The strategy worked brilliantly. Although reggae and pop music have enjoyed a long and fruitful cross-pollination, there was something revolutionary about "In the Summertime." Bob Marley's "I Shot the Sheriff and the Paragons's "Tide Is High" are among the reggae songs that have been successfully covered by pop stars. Eric Clapton topped the charts with "I Shot the Sheriff in 1974, and Blondie had a number-one hit with "Tide Is High" in 1981 in both the U.S. and the U.K. Shinehead's "Billie Jean" proved that a pop lyric could mash up any dance when set to a reggae rhythm. But this was the first time that anyone had thought to deejay over a pop song in a dancehall style — a formula that has since been repeated with
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great success by many, including No Doubt and Bounty Killer, with their "Hey Baby" collaboration. Just as dancehall fans are captivated by the familiar melodies and rhythm tracks of Studio One and Treasure Isle standards (some of the biggest dancehall hits of the past year, including Warrior King's "Virtuous Woman," which rides a cut of Coxsone Dodd's "Zion Gate" rhythm, and Swade and Tony Rebel's "Just Friends," which is indebted to the Heptones's "Mama," have been re-licks of Studio One and Treasure Isle classics), pop listeners were hooked on the familiar melody of "In the Summertime." Conforming to the dancehall mode (which can be compared to jazz in its use of age-old standards as a jumping-off point for boundless improvisation), Shaggy took the body of the Mungo Jerry hit, emptied it of its lyrical content, and reinvented it by injecting his own energetic toasting. It rose to the top spot on both the British and American charts. Shaggy had found a formula that worked — even if reggae purists initially rejected it. And it wasn't only a triumph for Shaggy: the success of "In the Summertime" brought songwriter Ray Dorset, Mungo Jerry's frontman, the distinction of being the only Brit ever to have a number-one hit more than once, in the U.S. and the U.K., with the same song."" Criticized in reggae circles for watering down dancehall music and selling out to the highest bidder, Shaggy has repeatedly defended his music's incorporation of pop elements. "You've got to do that at some point," he told the Boston Globe. "If you're not a force to be reckoned with, you're not a force at all. I think Marley was faced with the same situation back in his day. He
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had to do a lot of [musical] alterations to make it happen . . . Chris Blackwell [who produced Marley's first international releases on Island Records] said Marley delivered the core music and then they overdubbed certain things to make it acceptable to radio formats. I think you have to be open to change, but I still feel you need to keep somewhat of a base — and I will forever be known as a reggae artist, even though what I do is not 100 percent authentic reggae music.""7 In any case, as Shaggy told the Virginian-Pilot in 1995, the formatting and categorizing of music isn't what's important. "This is music; there are no barriers. Jamaica's motto is 'Out of many, one people.' Out of many styles, one music . . . I want radio and everybody to get used to the fact that Shaggy will be different."" Further illuminating his mission, he told interviewer Katy Salmon, "We keep breaking down these boundaries and it all works. In Jamaica, there's no formatting of music. On the radio, you'll hear Beenie Man and right after is Dolly Parton. You're raised on music like that.""9 "If people can't jump to my music," he added in an interview with the New York Times, "I'm going to go into their music and bring it into my music."'"0 Not only did Shaggy succeed in dipping into pop music and remaking it in a dancehall style with "In the Summertime," but he also confirmed with the remainder of the Boombastic album that he hadn't forgotten his reggae roots in the process. Of the album's fourteen tracks, only the hip-hop-flavored "Something Different" (featuring dancehall singer and fellow Rae Town native Wayne Wonder) and "Why You Treat Me So Bad" (with rapper Grand Puba), along with "Heartbreak Suzie" (guest-starring Gold Mine),
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are clear deviations from the dancehall idiom. This is to be expected, as the musicians, producers, and engineers who created the album are part of the dancehall mainstream. As a result, Shaggy's dancehall roots are plainly evident on tracks like "Finger Smith" (mixed by "Bulby" York), which warns listeners to beware of the neighborhood pickpocket over a rolling dancehall rhythm. There's also "Forgive Them Father" (also mixed by York), a "conscious" dancehall workout that declares money the root of all evil and identifies Shaggy as "one of Jah Jah son"; it also implores ghetto youths mixed up in gang or tribal warfare to put an end to the violence and obey the will of the Father. In yet another dancehall song with a religious flavor, Shaggy once more turns his attention to the suffering of the ghetto youth, this time telling all sufferers to "put your trust in Jah Rastafari." As if that weren't enough to indicate that Shaggy was staying true to his musical roots, the album features "Train Is Coming," a remake of rocksteady superstar Ken Boothe's classic — in a dancehall style, of course — and "Day Oh," a tribute to the Jamaican street-corner sound system. Arguably Shaggy's best album to date, Boombastic did a wonderful job, as the deejay told the New York Daily News, of catering to the pop audiences "while keeping the street following."'"" "I learned a long time ago what is necessary to recruit an audience," Shaggy explained to the St. Petersburg Times just as Boombastic was taking the world by storm. "It's in places like Europe and Asia where you see how reggae is so popular . . . There are no boundaries, because reggae is so much a part of
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pop music. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones — they knew about it long ago, and they put it in their music."m Having reached platinum by reversing this formula and adding pop elements to his infectious reggae vibe, the pride of Flatbush seemed headed for even bigger things. But with the 1997 release of what would be his final album for Virgin, Shaggy's career took a sudden and drastic turn for the worse.
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"Just from traveling around the world," Shaggy told Elena Oumano right after the release of his third album, Midnite Lover, "you really see who your audience is, who's actually buying your records . . . Then, you get back your sales statistics. The songs that actually sell me are the 'Oh Carolinas,' the 'Nice and Lovelys,' the 'Summertimes,' 'Boombastics' — the songs with a happy pop feel. When I go to places like Italy or Israel, my dancehall tunes don't go over as well as the pop ones."'"' Winding up a globe-trotting tour that had taken him all over the U.S.A., to South Africa, to Slovenia, Russia, and almost everywhere in between, Shaggy returned home to record Midnite Lover. He brought with him some fresh insight into his groundbreaking success, a willingness to bend his music even further to suit pop sensibilities, and a new determination to outdo his past triumphs. "People are going to say that Boombastic is a classic album, that we're never going to top that," he laughed in an interview with Antony Phillips of the Auckland Sunday News, "but I heard the same thing about Pure Pleasure, and we sure did beat it. I think [Midnite Lover] is my best album so far."'"4
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With the full support of Virgin's marketing team — and the inclusion of the album's second single, "Dream," on the soundtrack of the film Speed 2 — Midnite Lover seemed poised to pick up where Boombastic had left off. "Piece of My Heart," the debut single, was, as Bobby Clarke, producer and president of IRIE Jam FM on New York's WRTN, told Elena Oumano, "playing to overwhelming response from listeners. We predict that this single will do very well."'"5 Virgin's Gemma Corfield, vice president of A&R, announced that the company had a great deal of confidence in Shaggy as they prepared to release his third set. "Our marketing strategy is to turn a platinum album seller, which he already is, into a multi-platinum seller with our street, urban, and pop campaigns," she said. "This is his third album, and it's a fresh new sound for him, with tracks across the board from reggae dancehall to urban to crossover and pop music. The main thing about Shaggy is, his music is fun, and he's a fun artist."'" But, as Virgin would learn, Shaggy's first two albums did not sell by the truckload simply because the music was fun. Propelled onto the charts by catchy singles "Oh Carolina," "Boombastic," and "In the Summertime" — all of which managed to retain a distinct reggae flavor while making certain concessions (such as deejaying in clear English rather than patois) to draw in the pop audience — Shaggy's early music was fun and utterly unique yet still true to its dancehall roots. As Mr. Boombastic told Antony Phillips, the same thing could not be said for Midnite Lover. "This album's geared for radio, the others were more of a street thing . . . In music you need some respect and you need to get on the radio. This is a more experimental album for me."'"7
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Much to the disappointment of fans who had come to love Shaggy for his playful and melodic take on the roughhouse dancehall tradition, the deejay's desire to increase radio exposure and boost sales was causing his music to drift further and further from sunny Jamaica. Not that the songs on Midnite Lover aren't happy and bouncy — they are — but it's hard to imagine most of the tracks being played anywhere in the vicinity of a Jamaican dancehall. Despite the fact that Shaggy enlisted the help of some of the most important figures in the history of reggae music — including Jamaica's ruling drum and bass combo, Sly & Robbie, champion producer Dave "Rude Boy" Kelly (who's widely recognized as the most innovative reggae producer of the past ten years), as well as Lynford "Fatta" Marshall and Colin "Bulby" York — many of the album's thirteen tracks sound as though they were written for heavy rotation on an easy-listening station rather than sound-system play. The album's first single, "Piece of My Heart," appears to be an obvious attempt to apply the formula that worked so wonderfully on "In the Summertime"; again, Shaggy went digging through the vaults of popular music to find an old favorite to cover in the deejay style. "Piece of My Heart" is an Erma Franklin tune made famous by Janice Joplin in the 19603, and on this version Shaggy trades licks with Marsha, the guest vocalist, adding his customary cool, Loverman commentary. But Shaggy's deejaying here — unlike his toasting on "In the Summertime," "Oh Carolina," "Boombastic," and many others — is set to a tame rhythm colored by soft acoustic guitars and keyboards and overpowered by lush harmonies and expressive lead vocals. For whatever reason, the song simply didn't sell.
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Neither, however, did the follow-up single, "My Dream." If "Piece of My Heart" strayed too far from the reggae path that Shaggy had followed to fame and fortune, "My Dream" lost sight of that path entirely. Although he'd made his name as a dancehall deejay who drew inspiration from rockstone-voiced chatters like Buju Banton and Shabba Ranks, Shaggy actually sings on this single, sounding more than a little uncomfortable and slightly out of tune. Marred by cliched lyrics, an uninspired pop rhythm, and the overuse of keyboards and guitars, the single failed to entice the music-buying public. Still, as Shaggy explained to Kronick, there was a good deal of high-quality music on the Midnite Lover album, but much of it was too dancehall-flavored for his label's liking. "I told Virgin that if they put 'Sexy Body Girls' out, we would've been Nice! Muh'fuckas didn't wanna hear it!"'2 As Gemma Corfield, one of the album's executive producers, suggests, Virgin wanted Shaggy to reach an even bigger audience than he had found through Boombastic and Pure Pleasure, and they thought that making his music more traditionally pop-sounding and releasing what they considered radio-friendly singles were the way to go.
But, as Shaggy realized, the label had seriously missed the mark. "Virgin was sitting there thinking they know this shit and picking the wrong singles," he told rudegal.com. "And record companies do that. You don't blame the artists because shit flops. There are a lot of executives that think they know it and sometimes it just doesn't work. You know what I'm saying? There are executives that sometimes once they see that it'll happen,
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they're okay and they'll roll with it. Some of them are just adamant about things and it gets fucked.""" If Shaggy had had his way with the label, "Sexy Body Girls" would have been released as a major-label single. But as he told Kronick, "The suits at Virgin were like [putting on a white-man executive voice], 'Well, we don't see Shaggy there.' I was like, 'Fuck You!'" Produced by hardcore dancehall dons "Fatta" Marshall and "Bulby" York, the melodic dancehall rhythm (called "Eye of the Tiger") was recorded by Sly Dunbar, Robbie Shakespeare, and Christopher Birch in Jamaica. Accompanied by versions from hardcore deejay Merciless ("One of Them"), as well as "The Mighty" Bounty Killer and Brian and Tony Gold ("A Love That's Real"), the tune was a massive hit in Jamaica when it appeared as a seven-inch single on Shaggy's underground Big Yard label in 1998. "Yo, that shit hit so hard in Jamaica," Shaggy continued to Kronick, "I gotta go do a video with some kid in Germany who did that shit over. I gotta go do the video where Virgin wasn't even feeling that track."'!° Not only had Virgin released two singles that bombed, but the label also failed to capitalize on what may well have been a massive hit because they didn't want to relegate Shaggy to the reggae ghetto. As a result of their own miscalculation, Virgin executives dropped Shaggy. Not even two years after he had sold platinum and accepted a Grammy for Boombastic, his label gave up on him. This left Shaggy dejected, depressed, and unemployed. "When I got dropped from Virgin," he told Sydney's Sun Herald in 2OOI, "it was a very low point for me ... Basically, not having
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a deal is like losing your job. It leaves you with an uncertain future. There were a lot of people around me who I thought were down with me and they weren't. People got to do what they feel and they felt like I was over, like they had ridden that horse as far as they could. I can't blame them because apart from Bob Marley there is no track record of reggae music being successful, so you have to roll with the punches."'3' Although these comments — made after he'd signed with MCA and Hotshot had gone multiplatinum — might indicate that Shaggy accepted Virgin's decision relatively gracefully, he later admitted to Newhouse News Service that it had been "a very bad time" for him. "These were people I gave my heart and soul to," he said of the Virgin management. "It felt something like betrayal. . . The first time I gave them an album where the first single didn't work, they just bailed. And that sends a message to the industry that you're kind of finished, so obviously it got to me. It lowered my self-esteem, and I had to find a way to build it back up."* One big step towards building his self-esteem back up was realizing that the music business is just that — a business. And ever since large corporations gained a stranglehold on the recording industry, that business has become more and more cutthroat. "I don't think they were looking at reggae as a career type of music," Shaggy said to Rolling Stone. "It's like chewing gum: You chew it, and when the juices run out, you spit it out."'33 "I don't think it'll ever change either," he continued in an interview with the Toronto Star, "because music has become corporate. It's not like back in the days when you had Ahmet [Ertegun], who
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had Atlantic Records, and Clive [Davis], who had Arista, and Chris Blackwell had Island and they knew what it took to develop artists, and this was their company and their money and they could invest it. Now you've got these record companies that are owned by these corporations that have nothing to do with music and don't know how music operates."'* Cobra, another dancehall deejay signed to a major-label contract in the early 19908 boom, confirmed to the Gleaner, "In some companies, if they don't make back their money they will shelve you. When I worked for [Columbia] they gave me maximum mileage and publicity. They had me do a lot of prime time radio interviews, a lot of magazine interviews with publications such as Billboard and Time magazine." But "Sometimes the labels that deal with [Jamaican] artists don't market reggae properly. The ones that you see gobble up the reggae albums, they don't give straight attention to the projects and they don't take the careers of the artistes into consideration.""' Cobra scored a hit with the single "Flex" — which almost went platinum — and his album, Hard to Wet, Easy to Dry, did exceptionally well by reggae standards, falling just short of gold status. But, like Shaggy and others, the deejay was dropped by his label before he had a chance to build on this success. Recently, Robert Livingston voiced his thoughts on this to the Gleaner: "It is a whole new ball game [when an artist signs to a major label], regardless of how long they have been dealing with Jamaicans. However, they're in business and if the accountants don't see the dough coming in, that's it. Virgin didn't think Shaggy was worth it any longer based on their investment."'5
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Cristy Barber, the director of A&R for VP Records in New York, has worked for just about every major label to sign a reggae talent. She, too, has noted that the majors have little patience for artists who don't provide an immediate return on their investment. "Most times," she told the Gleaner, "the people who are in decision-making positions are not educated enough about the music and the culture they are getting into. They are not about development, because they want quick, easy money . . . [T]hey do not take the time to mould [their artists]. They drop them and this can be particularly devastating to an artiste who felt he was on the verge of a breakthrough."'57 When Virgin cut him loose, Shaggy told Ebony in 2001, "they were just following in the footsteps of the other labels. They just figured that is how it is with reggae music, that it will be going for a while, and whenever the juice runs out, you just kinda bail out. They did it with Shabba, they did it with Steel Pulse, they did it with Maxi Priest. As soon as you have one failure, that's it. 'Okay, let's not spend any more money. Let's not build anymore. That's it. Let's find a new flavor of the month and sign it.' That's basically what happened."'3
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Unceremoniously dumped by Virgin, Shaggy was down but not out. Although it would be almost two years before he'd sign another major-label contract — this time with Universal/MCA — he continued to write and produce fresh material. Soon after receiving a letter from Virgin informing him that his services were no longer required, Shaggy hooked up with hit producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis to do a song for the MCA soundtrack for How Stella Got Her Groove Back. Shaggy described their meeting to soultrain.com: I was just flattered from day one that Jam and Lewis even knew who Shaggy was [laughing]. You know, these guys are huge. They got in touch with us to do "Luv Me, Luv Me" with Janet Jackson for How Stella Got Her Groove Back. And I remember them coming to me and saying, "Oh, yeah. Just flip this beat." And the chorus is like, "Ooh, boy I love you so." Rah, rah, rah. So I wrote it that day and evening, and I voiced it at night. And [Terry Lewis] was just so very complimentary. He was like, "Man, you flipped this real hot." And I'm like, "This is Terry Lewis telling me this. I mean, I'm
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just a little reggae guy." And then I asked him who was gonna sing the chorus and he was like, "Mariah or Janet." And I'm like, "Whoa!" . . . And it ended up being Janet, and we had a big hit with that. And because the chemistry was so great, he actually saw me at a concert in Minneapolis and came to me and said, "I hear you're doing an album. Is it finished?" I said, "Well, you know, it's pretty much finished." He was like, "Well, we'd like to get involved." And then he got in touch with me, and then we kind of just hooked up, and they gave me two songs [for Hotshot], and it was really cool.'* Although the song wasn't released in the U.K. until it appeared (in altered form) on Hotshot two years later, "Luv Me, Luv Me" became a top-five hit on the U.S. pop charts. Virgin brass already had to be wondering whether they'd made a mistake. In fact, they went out of their way to prevent Shaggy from achieving success with his new venture. Shaggy's former label tried to block the release of "Luv Me, Luv Me." They prohibited their client Janet Jackson from appearing in the video and from doing any promotional work for the project. The whole thing was "a big drama," Shaggy told Ebony three years later.'4" Despite the drama surrounding "Luv Me, Luv Me," the record proved that Shaggy still had considerable hit-making power. But, as this short interval between major-label deals showed, Shaggy was more than just your average pop star. In 1996, he had a chart-topping Jamaican hit, "Shake Your Body," a brilliant combination disc with singer Mikey Spice. And he used the downtime
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between deals to voice a number of seven-inch singles directed at the hardcore Jamaican dancehall market and intended for sound-system play. Recorded for superstar Jamaican producer Dave "Rude Boy" Kelly's Xtra Large imprint in 1998, Shaggy's "Hot Gal," a cut of the "Showtime" rhythm, made an impact on the Jamaican dancehall circuit and proved that the deejay hadn't gone soft. The same year, Shaggy cut a single called "Mattress Jockey" on the "Siren" rhythm for New York-based ragga producer and sound-system owner Bobby Konders's Massive B label. A year later, he issued "Girls File," a cut of Dave Kelly's wholly original "Bug" rhythm (Mad House), as well as "Model Ya Mi Gal" on his own "Kak Up" rhythm (Big Yard). Scoring hits for deejay Spragga Benz, the team of Tanto Metro and Devonte (both appeared on Greensleeves's Ragga Ragga Ragga 14 compilation), and Shaggy himself, this Big Yard production became one of the biggest dancehall rhythms of the year. But Shaggy has never been content simply to mash up the dance. He'd always had his eyes on the world stage, and that didn't change — even while he was without a record deal. He told interviewer Jordan Paramor that he wasn't "lazing around" between albums. "I've been doing a whole bunch of other stuff," he said, "mainly putting together my new album, Hotshot. . . I've been really busy."'4' Released on August 8, 2000, Shaggy's first album for MCA wasn't initially greeted with much enthusiasm. One reason was that MCA made the same mistake that Virgin had: the label released the wrong single. The Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis-produced lead single, "Dance and Shout," was an adaptation of the
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Jackson 5's late-!97Os disco-tinged "Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground)." But the pop-buying public didn't bite. Hotshot tumbled all the way to number 137 on the U.S. charts. Later, speaking to the New York Daily News, Shaggy said, "I'm just glad [MCA] stuck with me . . . I'm sure they were probably this close to bailing, because they're just a corporation. It was a close call."'4" Ironically — in light of the music industry's extensive efforts to shut down Internet music-sharing services — Hotshot was rescued from CD bargain bins around the world when a Hawaiian radio jock named Pablo Sato played an illegally acquired Hotshot cut. Why? He thought it was a lot catchier than the lead single. Where'd he get the song? Well, he downloaded it from the Internet. Sato explained the chain of events that eventually landed "It Wasn't Me" on the top of the world charts and carried Hotshot all the way to diamond status. "What happened was, a couple of summers ago, I downloaded a copy of the album on the Internet," he said as he drove through the mountains of Hawaii, talking on his cell phone. Which site? Sato won't tell, but he does reveal that "There was an independent site, and there were a bunch of albums already posted on the site in advance of the release date." Sato works for radio station 1-94. "We are one of three contemporary hit-radio-format stations in Hawaii," he explained. "This means there are three stations that play identical music. So we are always looking to play songs before anyone else — like the I~94 exclusives, world premieres, and whatnot. Shaggy's always been a big, sort of like a core artist, for Hawaii. So when we
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found the album I was like, 'Cool,' and we downloaded the whole album. I was driving around listening to it, and, you see, the record label was pushing a single . . . 'Dance and Shout.' And that record just wasn't us. My friends and I were listening to it, and it was all right but kind of corny. So we're listening to it, and I heard 'It Wasn't Me,' and I thought, 'Wow, this is kinda cool,' and I pushed repeat on my CD player and kept repeating it and thought, 'Hey, this might be something good.'" Normally, radio stations are not authorized by record companies to play songs that have not been released as singles. There's a reason certain songs are released as singles: the record companies think they know which songs people will like best, and they pour a lot more time, energy, and, most importantly, money into the singles. On pop albums, the remaining tracks are often just filler. Sato, however, zeroed in on "It Wasn't Me," convinced that it could be a hit. "I said to my boss, 'We need to play ["It Wasn't Me"]'; my boss was sick that day, 'cause I think he wasn't listening to me, because he said, 'Sure, go ahead and do whatever you wanna do.' So I put it on the air, and instantly people were just requesting it, saying, 'Oh my God, who is this? How can I get it?' And I continued to tell them it was an I~94 exclusive, you can't get it anywhere, just keep listening, and we'll play it again in the near future. It got so bad we could play it two times in a row, and people would say, 'I need more of it!' So it was kind of ridiculous. It was an instant hit." When I asked what it is about Shaggy that is so attractive to listeners in Hawaii — and elsewhere — Sato had this to say: "Hawaii, in general, is a mixture of all sorts of cultures rolled into
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one. A lot of times, the Hawaiian music is real big in Hawaii, and reggae music is real big in Hawaii, and dancehall is real big too. So Shaggy's music, in essence, is a mixture of all — like the dancehall, the reggae, and the Hawaiian. That works out really well for Hawaiian listeners. But the reason why I think it hit in the mainland and why it really worked in the U.S. and internationally? It's because it's a funny song; it's a hilarious story with an up-tempo beat. It won't put you to sleep. People hear it and say, 'Oh, did you hear that Shaggy song? It's hilarious!' I think that everyone lived through a scenario like what is described in the song or has seen it happen. I think that's why." MCA wasn't mad at Sato for playing an illegally downloaded song. In fact, the label didn't seem to mind the buzz the track was generating at all. "We didn't get a whole lot of flack from the record label," Sato explains. "I think they were going to shelve the album — meaning they weren't going to go ahead and see if the album could get more play. I think they were going to go with that one single, and after that, if it didn't pan out, they were just going to shelve it, just throw it on the side. But we kept calling the record label saying ['It Wasn't Me'] is the song you need to be pushing — this is the hit. It took them awhile, and then once they started releasing CD singles of it, next thing you know, that's when the mainland U.S.A. starts picking up on it, and this is already three to four to maybe even five months after we started playing the song. More than them being upset, we got a 'thanks' for helping us out from the label. It took awhile for them to actually respond to it, and then I don't know what the grand total of album sales is, but it's millions and millions." Thanks to Pablo Sato, Hotshot has now been certified diamond — that's ten million copies sold!
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Still, Sato has never discussed the "It Wasn't Me" saga with Shaggy himself. "He's come in and out of the islands a couple of times, but I've never really met him. I met him once, I was like, 'Hey, how you doing?' and it was at a nightclub, and I think he was drunk." From Robert Livingston, however, Sato did receive a big thank-you. "Soon after the song hit big, they sent me a watch — the management company. Actually, it was a nice watch. I mean, it wasn't a Rolex or anything like that. It wasn't' attached to the key to a new car or a new house, but it was more just to say thanks. I would have liked it if they'd waited until it went platinum." Does Sato feel in some way responsible for Shaggy's success? "I would like to think so, but I'm just glad that we could help them out." Sato does, however, admit that Shaggy has done something different from other reggae artists, and that could explain why he has done so well. "You can really hear the difference between a song like 'It Wasn't Me' and a Sean Paul or a Beenie Man. It's just the way the tracks are produced. They aren't really popdriven. Shaggy was flirting with it, and the only time he's done something like that and actually charted was with 'Boombastic.' I think these other artists are deemed reggae artists, not necessarily like your Top 40 — those Top 40 stations are afraid to touch them, I think. Perhaps, though, more and more of these reggae artists are doing things with Top 40 artists. Already we see Bounty Killer with No Doubt, Beenie Man with Mya; that might possibly be their only way into the genre of Top 40. Shaggy broke it really big with 'Boombastic,' and once that crossed over, that gave him the headway to get in there. I think all of these others need to not necessarily change but open
IST
shaggy: dogamuffin style
people's eyes to the fact that they can cross over. I think a lot of people have misconceptions." While record companies might not, as Sato suggests, understand that Top 40 listeners are ready for dancehall to cross over, there's no question that "It Wasn't Me" — on the strength of highquality singing, funny lyrics, and wicked deejaying — was a major worldwide hit. With the help of Robert Livingston and Shaggy, both of whom jumped on a plane to Hawaii to promote "It Wasn't Me" shortly after Sato broke the news to MCA, the single was soon playing on radio stations across the world. Entering the U.S. charts in November 2000, the song hit number two in January 2001. Amazingly, the infectious hit managed to reach number thirty-one on the U.K. charts on February 17, 2001 — despite the fact that it hadn't yet been released in the U.K. "It Wasn't Me" had made its way onto the charts based on import sales alone. On March 10, 2001, shortly after its official release, the single shoved aside Atomic Kitten's "Whole Again" to grab the top spot on the U.K. charts. "It Wasn't Me" was now Shaggy's most successful single "inna Inglan." But it didn't stop there. The combination disc (this time the guest vocals were supplied by Ricardo "Rik Rok" Ducent) was also a huge hit in Jamaica. It spawned a cover by Beenie Man and an alternative version by Kentucky Kid and Halloway — called "Mistaken Identity," which appeared as a seven-inch on the Junk Yard label. In typical dancehall fashion, the hit tune also drew fire from fellow deejays. Ranking queen of slackness Lady Saw teamed up with vocalist Marsha to record "Son of a Bitch" over the same rhythm shortly after "It Wasn't Me" hit. A
ItO
Dog
Nuh
Dead
woman's response to what has become a player's anthem ("Hey, it wasn't me!"), the song makes clear what Jamaica's slackest female deejay thinks of cheaters. On the heels of "It Wasn't Me," Shaggy launched an even bigger hit. Ultimately reaching the top spot in the U.S., the U.K, Australia, and all over Europe, "Angel" dominated charts everywhere in 2OOI. Once again, Shaggy had teamed up for a huge success with Rayvon, his friend and hit-making vocalist for more than ten years. As Shaggy has explained on more than one occasion, "Shaggy" is not the work of one man alone. The team responsible for "Angel," and for most of Shaggy's hits, included Sting International (who created the rhythm track). Although the vocals on the final recording were provided by Rayvon — who has gone on to sign his own deal with MCA and is well on his way to becoming a big name in his own right — the song was partially inspired by Rik Rok. Shaggy described the making of "Angel" to MTV.com: "We started with the beat. Sting looped Steve Miller's 'The Joker,' and it was just raw drum and bass. I'm sorry, Steve, but that's reggae right there. It hit me with such a fat bass line, and the vibe was hot. Then Rik Rok walked into the studio singing 'Angel of the Morning,' and it just clicked. I'm like, 'This is hot. Let's change a couple of words and make this street talk about my peeps, baby. Let's talk about the time you be cheating on your girl and she's holding it down for you.' How many times do guys screw up and realize that all them chicks they were hitting wasn't even worth the time of day? Meanwhile, old girl was the one that was there when you got locked up. Life is one big party when you're
Ibl
shaggy: dogamuffin style
still young, but who's gonna have your back when it's all done? That alone says it. It's just plain homage to the women that hold it down."'4J Brilliantly combining the bass line to Steve Miller's "The Joker" with Chip Taylor's 1968 "Angel of the Morning," Shaggy's biggest success to date provides yet another example of how popular dancehall deejaying can be when it's set to a pop music vibe. In the same way that dancehall deejays continue to rely on classic reggae rhythms to bring an element of the familiar to their offerings, "Angel" shows that the same formula can be successfully applied to music aimed at a global audience. Shaggy once again draws the listener in with a familiar bass line and a catchy, well-known chorus while throwing down yet another energetic, dancehall-style toast. Shaggy's success at working within the dancehall tradition while versioning pop songs like "Angel" proves that reggae's thirtyyear-old hit-making formula (as well as its sound, its style, and its distinct vibe) can be taken off the island of Jamaica and broadcast around the world. Reggae "inna dancehall style" is the popular music of Jamaica. Thanks to Shaggy, the dancehall style is now popular around the world.
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^/ZclPlpit 13
Reggae
Ambassador
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Although Shaggy has taken reggae music from the dark dancehalls of Jamaica to distant corners of the globe, he has never lost touch with his roots. Once frowned upon as a foreign artist who was thought to be diluting the music by incorporating pop, rock, and R&B flavas, Shaggy is now a hero in Jamaica. Not only does he mash up virtually every Jamaican stage show lucky enough to have him on the bill, but he also acts as an ambassador for both the music and his native country wherever he goes. Recently appointed an official spokesperson for the Jamaica Tourist Board, Shaggy is doing his part to promote two of the island nation's largest industries. In a recent Gleaner article, Jamaica's director of tourism, Fay Pickersgill, praised Shaggy for his diligence in bringing reggae to the world — and in bringing the world to the birthplace of reggae. "Shaggy, an international star and son of Jamaica, is one of our highly valued voices for tourism. Not only does he enjoy a huge following among young adults internationally, but he is admired by other generations for his professional conduct and natural charm. The Jamaica Tourist Board is therefore very
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shaggy: d o g a m u f f i n style
happy to have Shaggy on-board in speaking for Jamaica and promoting our destination to the world."'44 In addition to this promotion work, Shaggy has been involved in efforts to make Jamaica a better place to live. That's why in March of this past year he donated twenty-five thousand dollars to Jamaica's Bustamante Children's Hospital, the only pediatric hospital in the English-speaking Caribbean. Following in the grand tradition of dancehall stars who have used their success as a means of helping their communities (a long list that includes the likes of Sugar Minott, Prince Jazzbo, Capleton, and Bounty Killer), Shaggy remains involved in dancehall at a grassroots level. Through the establishment of Big Yard, the record label he set up in association with Robert Livingston, he has expanded his focus to encompass producing and promoting music by less visible talents. Since its inception, in 1995, Big Yard has been producing seveninch singles designed for sound-system and club play. The label scored its first hit the same year with hardcore deejay Merciless's "Mavis" (the song spent a number of weeks atop British reggae charts before being licensed by Greensleeves for inclusion on the Ragga Ragga Ragga 5 compilation). In 1996, Big Yard struck again with "Shake Your Body," by Shaggy and singer Mikey Spice. Lady Saw and Marsha's "Son of a Bitch," the not-fit-for-airplay answer to "It Wasn't Me," appeared on the label shortly after the original song became popular in the dancehall. Most recently, Big Yard has added the "9 to 5/My Decision" rhythm to its dancehall selection, with cuts from Bounty Killer ("My Decision"), singjay Junior Kelly ("Try a 9 to
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Reggae Ambassador
5"), Rayvon ("Chronic"), Brian and Tony Gold ("Wrong Head"), and Shaggy and Jennifer "Robin" Simms ("Too Hot to Handle"). Perhaps more importantly, the label has recently signed a distribution deal with MCA. Entering into this association with a major label, the Big Yard family set their sights beyond the tiny seveninch market. One of their first orders of business was to produce My Bad, Rayvon's second album. His 1996 debut, Hear My Cry, failed to make an impression, but because Rayvon has played such a key role in Shaggy's success — providing guest vocals on "Big Up," "In the Summertime," "Nice and Lovely," and "Angel" — Shaggy and the rest of the Big Yard family were happy to give him a boost. Since first meeting the deejay while waiting to voice a tune at Brooklyn's Living Room Studios in 1988, Bruce "Rayvon" Brewster has been a key member of the Shaggy organization. "We made sure to give Rayvon a very, very wicked album," Shaggy told the Gleaner in a recent interview. "It's better than Hotshot. We're getting better at what we do, better at writing. The confidence level is way up, obviously, because of Hotshot's, success." With an ear for pop, B&B, and hip-hop styles, members of the Big Yard family possess an unparalleled understanding of how to integrate reggae into the mainstream. They're currently applying this knowledge to producing Rik Rok, backup singers Brian and Tony Gold (who have been in the reggae business since the 19805), Prince Midas, singer Marsha Marrison, and Shaggy himself: his new album will be released in the fall of 2O02. "I look at Big Yard as the next Island Records, not just specializing in Caribbean music," Shaggy said to the Gleaner. "Myself, Robert,
1L7
shaggy: dogamuffin style
Sting, we all have an ear, not just for West Indian music but for mainstream music."Hj The professionalism and dedication of Shaggy's camp were also important factors in MCA'S decision to pick up Big Yard. Randy Chin, vice president of marketing at New York's VP Records, the largest reggae distributor in the world, explained to the Gleaner that "Reggae is a difficult music in terms of marketing and if you are doing it, you have to know it inside out. That is one of the reasons the majors are staying away [from other reggae artists]. They don't have the expertise to handle it."4 But the Big Yard family and other new forces on the reggae scene are beginning to change all that. And several recent highprofile collaborations between pop stars and dancehall deejays vividly demonstrate that reggae is reeling in new listeners every day. For instance, when hardcore deejay Bounty Killer teamed up recently with pop group No Doubt, they went platinum with "Hey Baby." No doubt, this type of success is what the people at Virgin had in mind when they decided to pair Janet Jackson with Grammy Award-winning Beenie Man for "Feel It Boy," the lead single from the deejay's latest album, Tropical Storm. Featuring three rhythm tracks produced by reggae-influenced hip-hop beatmasters the Neptunes (in addition to contributions from Dave Kelly, Sly & Robbie, Tony Kelly, and Beenie's Shocking Vibes camp), Tropical Storm seems poised to win over even more listeners. In an interview with Rex Rutkoski, Shaggy said that collaborations like these have played a crucial role in breaking down
Ibfi
Raggae Ambassador
barriers and opening doors for all forms of what's come to be called "urban" (that is, black) music. "I think it's happening," he remarked, speaking of the current integration of hip-hop, reggae, R&B, and pop styles — a revolution he's been leading for the past decade. "You listen to Top 40 radio now and it's sounding more rhythmic than anything else. Top 40 is playing Jay-Z now . . . It's getting that way, where a rhythmic station is getting a lot more ratings and Top 40 is kind of changing to that rhythmic format."'47 With Shaggy's acute ear for what will drop on Top 40 radio, his forthcoming album, fittingly titled Lucky Day, will reflect these new urban sensibilities. To rollingstone.com, he commented: "A lot of previous stuff, we used a lot of samples and maybe a reggae artist has to do that to get on mainstream radio. For the most part, if you bring the music to them in its natural form, nine out of ten [times] you might not get on radio, unless someone mixes in a little Marvin Gaye or Booker T & the MGS or Steve Miller or something like that. Now that [I've] sold way past 10 million albums worldwide, I don't have a problem proving myself. It's a lot more original stuff, very deep, as far as my songwriting [goes]. It'll still have the same tongue-in-cheek flavor to it because that's just my personality coming out in these songs." Then he joked, "I hang with a bunch of idiots anyway, so it's going to come out on the record.""" With song titles like "Shake Shake," "Hooky Jucky," "Strength of a Woman," "Full Control," "These Are the Lips," "Another Day," "Walking in My Shoes," and the lead-off single, "Hey Sexy Lady," it will be interesting to see what parts of Shaggy's personality are revealed on Lucky Day.
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shaggy: d o g a m u f f i n style
With each of his success stories, Shaggy has broken new ground for reggae. By adding familiar pop and rock elements to the previously foreign-sounding Jamaican dancehall, Shaggy has been instrumental in creating room for reggae on the world's pop charts. Recently, while chatting with whaddat.com about his unimaginable success, he said, "Yeah, I earned this, and I earned this by doing reggae music." Jamaica's top deejays, Bounty Killer and Beenie Man, are now following the trail Shaggy blazed to international recognition, and reggae music — the voice of a tiny, underdeveloped island nation — is growing stronger all the time. Fans of reggae still have to navigate their way through a jungle of obscure labels, little-known artists, and unrecognizable rhythms in their quest for the best of Jamaican music, but Shaggy has made their task immeasurably easier. As the deejay famously toasts, "Music is my mission / I'm here to take it around the world." In so doing, Shaggy has succeeded in bringing the world to Jamaican music as well. While much of the island's best music has, no doubt, floated from the massive speakers of its numerous sound systems, only to disappear into the Jamaican night, a great deal more remains out there, waiting to be "discovered." Thanks to Shaggy, the world is now much closer to enjoying the music and the culture that he loves so well.
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shaggy: dogamuffin stylQ
Personal Interviews Francis, Karen. Kingston, Dave. Lesser, Beth. Sato, Pablo. Steffens, Roger.
Chapter I: Dancehall Don at the Top of the Pops 1
Richie Yorke, "Virgin's Blue," Sunday Mail, 9 September 2001: 64.
2
Chuck Foster, "Shaggy: The New Breed," Roots Rock Reggae, Billboard, 1999. 174-83.
3 Simon Button, '"Don't Tell My Kids I'm a Rude Boy' — Shaggy," Sunday Express, 13 May 2001: 54. 4 Dave Simpson, "Mr. Lover Lover's Glorious Bonkathon," Guardian, 18 February 2OO2: 12. 5 Joshua Green, "Operation Desert Shaggy," Denver Westward, 18 October 1995, Backbeat section: 76. 6 Robbie Woliver, "For Reggae Star, a Life Flavored by 2 Islands," New York Times, 25 February 2001, Life section: 14. 7 Jeremy Novick, "The Weekend Starts Here: Shaggy's Riding That Wave Again," Express Post, 2 March 2001, Last section: 58. 8
Geoff Boucher, "A New Love for Reggae," Los Angeles Times, 17 February 2001, F section: I.
9 Elena Oumano, "Shaggy Shines on 3rd Set: Virgin Artist Aims to
172
Notes
Rule Reggae," Billboard, 2 August 1997. 10
Shaggy, interview, Today, National Broadcasting Corporation, 6 July 2001.
Chapter 2,1 Reggae inna DancehaE Style 11
Shaggy, interview, MuchMusic, 2001.
12
Norman Stolzoff, Wake the Town and Tell the People, Durham: Duke up, 2000. 3.
T
3 Steve Barrow and Peter Dalton, Reggae: The Rough Guide, Second Edition, London: Rough Guides, 2001. 437.
*4 Barrow and Dalton, 449. J
5 Barrow and Dalton, 3.
J
6 Lloyd Bradley, Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King, London: Penguin, 2001. 37.
Chapter gs DancehaE Culture l
l Lloyd Bradley, Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King, London: Penguin, 2001. 3-4.
18
Steve Barrow and Peter Dalton, Reggae: The Rough Guide, Second Edition, London: Rough Guides, 2001. n.
J
9 Norman Stolzoff, Wake the Town and Tell the People, Durham: Duke UP, 2OOO. 42.
20
Stolzoff, 42.
21
Barrow and Dalton, 11.
22
Barrow and Dalton, n.
2
3 Stolzoff,
2
173
3-4.
4 Stolzoff, i.
shaggy: dogamuffin style 2
5 Stolzoff, 27.
26
Stolzoff, 28.
2
7 Stolzoff, 30.
28
Stolzoff, 31.
Chapter 4: Version Galore 2
9 Chuck Foster, "Shaggy: The New Breed," Roots Rock Reggae, Billboard, 1999. 305.
3° Steve Barrow and Peter Dalton, Reggae: The Rough Guide, Second Edition, London: Rough Guides, 20OI. 131. 1
3 Lloyd Bradley, Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King, London: Penguin, 2001. 74. 2
3 Bradley, 289. 33 Barrow and Dalton, 75. 34 Bradley, 290-91. 35 Barrow and Dalton, 236. S^ Norman Stolzoff, Wake the Town and Tell the People, Durham: Duke UP, 2000. 101. 37 Stolzoff, 102.
38 Stolzoff, 102. 39 Barrow and Dalton, 261. 4° Barrow and Dalton, 273.
Chapter 5: Under Mi Sleng Teng 41 Beth Lesser, King Jammy's, Toronto: ECW Press, 2002. 38.
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Notes
Chapter 6; Jamaicans in New York 42 Chuck Foster, "Shaggy: The New Breed," Roots Rock Reggae, Billboard, 1999. 176. 43 Michael Mehle, "From Battlefield to Dance Floor, Gulf Veteran Shaggy Now a Reggae Hero," Denver Rocky Mountain News, 20 October 1995, Entertainment/Weekend section: 200. 44 Tero Kaski and Pekka Vuorinen, Reggae inna Dance Hall Style, Helsinki: Black Star, 1984. 16. 45 Foster, 176. 46 Burhan Wazir, "From Ragga Jeans to Rock Riches," Guardian, 22 September 1995, T section: 17. 47 Alan Jackson, "Cold Call," Times (London), 7 April 2001, Saturday section. 48 Patricia Meschino, "Dancing in the Street," Time Out New York, August 23-30, 2001. 49 "Erasmus Hall High School," Brooklyn Home Page, http://www.brooklyn.net/learning/ehhs.html. Accessed 20 April 2002. 5° "Erasmus Hall,"www.erasmushall.org. Accessed 20 April 2002. 51 Patricia Meschino, "It Is Shaggy!"; available from http://www.redstripebeer.com/volumeio/. Accessed 3 May 2002. 2
5 Ray Hurford and Colin Moore, "Wackies House of Music," More Axe, available from http://www.rayx.freeserve.co.uk/ wackies%2ohouse%2Oof%2Omusic.htm. Accessed 5 December 2001. 53 Robbie Woliver, "For Reggae Star, a Life Flavored by 2 Islands,"
175
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dogamuffin style
New York Times, 25 February 2001, Section 14x1: I. 54 Elena Oumano, "Shaggy Shines on 3rd Set: Virgin Artist Aims to Rule Reggae," Billboard, 2 August 1997. 55 Rebecca Levine, "Big Yard + Small Crew = Shaggy's Platinum Success," The Beat, August—September 2002: 17—18. 6
5 Benson Chao, "Three-Minute Hero: This Reggae Star Plans to Win Hearts in Hong Kong," South China Morning Post, 10 May 1996: 4. 57 Gary C.W. Chun, "Shaggy Still Seeking Respect," Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 30 November 2001, available from http://starbulletin.com/20Oi/ii/3O/features/story9.html. Accessed 5 May 2002.
Chapter 7: Semper Fidelis! 58 Kristi Singer, "Shaggy: Oh Yes, It Was Me!" Singer Magazine, September 2001. 59 Joshua Green, "Operation Desert Shaggy," Denver Westward, 18 October 1995, Backbeat section: 76. 6° Kevin O'Hare, "Shaggy: It WAS Him after All," Newhouse News Service, 25 June 2001. J
6 Benson Chao, "Three-Minute Hero: This Reggae Star Plans to Win Hearts in Hong Kong," South China Morning Post, 10 May 1996: 4. 62
John Aizlewood, "Do I Look like a One-Hit Wonder?" Guardian, 12 April 2001, Features section: 10.
^S Corporal Barry Melton, "Corps Influenced Mr. Boombastic," Marine Corps News, 16 September 1998.
17b
Notes 6
4 Lisa Verrico, "Lover's Guide," Times of London, 6 October 2001, Features section.
6
5 Melton.
66
Green, 76.
67 Elena Oumano, "Shaggy Shines on 3rd Set: Virgin Artist Aims to Rule Reggae," Billboard, 2 August 1997. 68
Isaac Guzman, "A 'Hot' Hit under Any Name," New York Daily News, 5 January 2001, New York Now section: 44.
6
9 Melton.
7° Patricia Meschino, "It Is Shaggy!"; available from http://www.redstripebeer.com/volumeio/. Accessed 3 May 2002.
Chapter 8; Babylon Homework 71 Joshua Green, "Operation Desert Shaggy," Denver Westward, 18 October 1995, Backbeat section: 76. 2
7 Fred Shuster, "Shaggy's Dogged Story: Reggae Singer Has Worked Hard to Bring His Sound to Fans," Los Angeles Daily News, 6 March 200, L.A. Life section: 1,3. 73 John Aizlewood, "Do I Look like a One-Hit Wonder?" Guardian, 12 April 2001, Features section: 10. 74 Burhan Wazir, "From Ragga Jeans to Rock Riches," Guardian, 22 September 1995, T section: 17. 75 Alan Jackson, "Cold Call," Times (London), 7 April 2001, Saturday section. 76 Bob Timm, "Shaggy Takes Charge," About.com, http://www.ska.about.com/library/weekly/ aaO33OOia.htm?terms=shaggy. Accessed 7 May 2002.
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77 Ibid. ?8 Kristi Singer, "Shaggy: Oh Yes, It Was Me!" Singer Magazine, September 2001. 79 Green, 76. 8° Ricky Wright, "Shaggy's Own Rap and Reggae Tour Come to the Boathouse," Virginian-Pilot, 30 September 1995, Daily Break section: EI. 81
Lynn Normant, "Hotshot: Shaggy Stages Super Comeback," Ebony Magazine, May 2001: 116.
82 "Nigeria: Shaggy Comes to Town with a Hotshot," Africa News, 17 December 2001. ^S Nadine Reid, "G.O. Interview with Mr. Boombastic," Germaica Observer, December 1999, available from http://www.germaica.net/observer/archiv/o7eng/ interview_shaggy.html. Accessed 3 April 2002. o,
Chuck Foster, "Shaggy: The New Breed," Roots Rock Reggae, Billboard, 1999: 177. 8
5 Wright.
86 Eric Pupecki, "DJ Redbeard a.k.a. Eric Pupecki Meets Shaggy," Kronick, 2OOI, http://www.kronick.eom/2.o/issue3O/ shaggy.shtml. Accessed 3 April 2002. "7 Lloyd Bradley, "A Brief History of Reggae Music," available from http://www.bbc. co.uk/radio2/shows/reggae_guide/ history.shtml. Accessed 7 June 2002. 88
Corporal Barry Melton, "Corps Influenced Mr. Boombastic," Marine Corps News, 16 September 1998.
8
9 Foster, 177.
17fl
Notes
Chapter 9? Pure Pleasure 9° Rebecca Levine, "Big Yard + Small Crew = Shaggy's Platinum Success," The Beat, August—September 2002. 1
9 John Aizlewood, "Do I Look like a One-Hit Wonder?" Guardian, 12 April 2001, Features section: 10. 92
Robbie Woliver, "For Reggae Star, a Life Flavored by 2 Islands," New York Times, 25 February 2001, Section 141,1: I.
93 Mel Cooke, "CME Awards Dinner March 2002," Shaggynow.com, http://www.shaggynow.com/ngm.html. Accessed I March 2002.
94 http://www.maxipriest.com. Accessed i March 2002. 95 Aizlewood. 9" Elena Oumano, "Shaggy Shines on 3rd Set: Virgin Artist Aims to Rule Reggae," Billboard, 2 August 1997. 97 "Shaggy: Still a Hotshot," RudeGal, http://www.rudegal.com/ shagintoi.htm. Accessed 13 February 2002. 98 Michael Mehle, "From Battlefield to Dance Floor, Gulf Veteran Shaggy Now a Reggae Hero," Denver Rocky Mountain News, 20 October 1995, Entertainment/Weekend section: 200. 99 Oumano. 100
Andrew Clunis, "Major Record Labels: Stamps of Success?" Jamaica Gleaner, 26 May 2000, Showtime section: I.
101
Andrew Clunis, "MCA Records Praises Shaggy," Jamaica Gleaner, 22 March 2002, Entertainment section: i.
102 10
Clunis, "MCA."
3 Tony Young, Master T: One VJs Journey, Toronto: EC\V Press, 2002.
17T
shaggy: d o g a m u f f i n style 10
4 "Shaggy."
10
5 John Masouri, "Sure Shot," Echoes, November 2001: 52.
10
6 Oumano.
10
7 Simon Button, '"Don't Tell My Kids I'm a Rude Boy' — Shaggy," Sunday Express, 13 May 2001: 54.
108
Rebecca Paton, "Shaggy Gets Thoughtful," Tearaway, http://www.tearaway.co.nz/entertainmentjheader.asp? ViewStory=l&StoryID=326. Accessed 4 January 2002.
10
9 Fred Bronson, "Reggae Making a Splash in U.S., U.K.," Billboard, 29 October 1993: 94.
110
Aizlewood, 10.
Chapter 1C: Mr. Fantastic 111
Benson Chao, "Three-Minute Hero: This Reggae Star Plans to Win Hearts in Hong Kong," South China Morning Post, 10 May 1996: 4.
113
Burhan Wazir, "From Ragga Jeans to Rock Riches," Guardian, 22 September 1995, T section: 17.
n
3 Ricky Wright, "Shaggy's Own Rap and Reggae Tour Come to the Boathouse," Virginia-Pilot, 30 September 1995, Daily Break section: EL
IL
4 Katy Salmon, "Kenya Falls for Shaggy," Inter Press Service, 26 January 20OI.
JI
5 "Shaggy Takes the Huff: The Success of Reggae Star Shaggy's Single 'Boombastic,'" Scottish Daily Record, 29 September
1SD
Notes
1995: 30. II(
^ http://www.mungojerry.com. Accessed 20 April 2002.
"7 Steve Morse, "Shaggy Won't Let His Hair Down," Boston Globe, I June 2001, section C: 13. 118 Wright, EI. "9 Salmon. 120
Neil Strauss, "The Pop Life," New York Times, 20 July 1995, section C: 14.
121
Nick Charles, "Shaggydog Story Transcends Reggae," New York Daily News, 8 November 1995, New York Now section: 33.
122 Logan Neill, "Reggae Gets a Contemporary Spin," St. Petersburg Times, 6 October 1995, Weekend section: 29.
Chapter II: Midnite Loser 12
3 Elena Oumano, "Shaggy Shines on 3rd Set: Virgin Artist Aims to Rule Reggae," Billboard, 2 August 1997.
12
4 Antony Phillips, "Shaggy's Gone All Smoochy," Sunday News (Auckland), 9 November 1997, Features section: 25.
12
5 Oumano.
I2(
> Oumano.
12
7 Phillips.
128 ]?ric Pupeckj^ "DJ Redbeard a.k.a. Eric Pupecki Meets Shaggy," Kronick, 2001, http://www.kronick.eom/2.o/issue3O/ shaggy.shtml. Accessed 3 April 2002. 12
9 "Shaggy: Still a Hotshot," RudeGal, http://www.rudegal.com/ shagintoi.htm. Accessed 13 February 2002.
1
3° Pupecki.
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shaggy: dogamuffin stylg I I
3 Peter Holmes, "Coming through a Smart Second," Sun Herald, 18 November 2001, Metro section: 3. 2
*3 Kevin O'Hare, "Shaggy: It WAS Him after All," Newhouse News Service, 25 June 2001. J
33 Mim Udovitch, "Shaggy's Boombastic Return," Rolling Stone, 3 February 2001, available from http.Y/www.rollingstone. com/news/newsarticle.asp?nid=l32Ol&%253Bcf=i222. Accessed 3 May 2002.
J
34 Betsy Powell, "Hotshot Shaggy," Toronto Star, I August 2001, Entertainment section: I.
J
35 Tyrone Reid, "Marketing Fails Music," Jamaica Gleaner, 13 January 2002.
J
S6 Andrew Clunis, "Major Record Labels: Stamps of Success?" Jamaica Gleaner, 26 May 2000.
W Clunis. J
38 Lynn Norment, "Hotshot: Shaggy Stages Super Comeback," Ebony, May 2001: 116.
Chapter 12: Dog Nuh Dead *39 http://www.soultrain.com. Accessed 2 February 2002. H0 Lynn Norment, "Hotshot: Shaggy Stages Super Comeback," Ebony, May 2001: 116. I I
4 Jordan Paramor, "Fancy a Shaggy?" Mirror, 9 March 2001: 18.
T 2
4 Isaac Guzman, "A 'Hot' Hit under Any Name," New York Daily News, 5 January 2001, New York Now section: 44.
^3 "Shaggy: Rocking You Wild," MTV.com, http://www.mtv.com/bands/ archive/s/shaggyoi/index3.jhtml. Accessed 4 March 2002.
l&E
index Aces Disco 66
Baby Cham 58
Aces International (sound system) 65
Baby Face 92
Admiral Bailey 23, 81, 83,114
"Bacardi Slang" 74
Admiral Tibett 63
Backstreet Boys 20,126
Africa News no
Bajja Jedd 91, 93,113
African Love (sound system/record
"Bam Bam" 101
label) 87,88,89,90,91 "A Get a Lick" 88,89
103,112,129,146
"Agony" (rhythm) 74 Aizlewood, John 107
Banton, Burro 82 Barber, Cristy quoted 150
Alcapone, Dennis 51, 52, 57 Andy, Horace 57, 87
Barnes, Lloyd. See Bulwackie Barrett, Aston. See Family Man
"Angel" 14, 24, 161-62, 167
Barrow, Steve quoted 32, 42, quoted
"Angel of the Morning" 14, 161-62 "Another Day" 169
Barry U (record label) 91
"Answer" (rhythm) 64, 102
Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King
Anthony B 58, 64
60
37
Arista Records 84,149
BBC 113, 127
Arrows (sound system) 65
Beat, The 93
Asher, Tony 74
Beatles, The 140
Ashley, Gary quoted 122—23
Beckford, Ewart. See U-Roy
Atlantic Records 149
"Bedwork Sensation" 113
Atomic Kitten 160
Beenie Man 58, 64, 82,122,138,
Augustus Buchanan (record label) 53
Ifl3
Banton, Buju 23, 58, 72, 83, 94,101,
159,160,168,170
shaggy: dogamuffin style
Beres Hammond 58
Brewster, Bruce. See Rayvon
"Better Must Come" 60
Brigadier Jerry 63, 87
"Big Hood" 101
"Big It Up" 112
Brown, Dennis 57, 67,117 Brown, Hopton. See Scientist
Big Joe 52
"Bug" (rhythm) 155
"Big Up" 18,102,103-04,109, in,
"Bullet Proof Buddy" 100
112,113,126,167 Big Yard (record label) 147,155, 166-68 Big Youth 52-53, quoted 53, 55, quoted 56-57, quoted 63, 64
Bulwackie 86-87, quoted 86, 91 Burning Spear 17, 31, 57 Bustamante Children's Hospital 166 Button, Simon 14,127,128 Byles, Junior 57, in
Billboard 14, 20, 92, 99,119,120, 129,134,149
Campbell, Cornell 22
"Billie Jean" 88, 89,136
Campbell, Lloyd. See Spiderman
Birch, Christopher 147
"Can't Keep a Good Man Down" 114
Black, Alton 91
Capleton 55, 58, 166
Black Ark Studio 58, 87, 88
Carey, Mariah 154 Caribbean Basin Initiative 61
Black Scorpio (sound system) 71-73, 81 Black Star Line 54
Carolina My Darling 114 CBS Records 66
Black Uhuru 17, 57, 67, 81
CD 135,168
Blackwell, Chris 138,149 Blondie 136
"Chain Gang" 90 Chaka Demus 23, 81, 82, 83, 87,
Bob Marley and the Wailers 57
94,129
Booker T & the MGS 169
Chantells, The 57
"Boombastic" 83, in, 113,133-34,
Chaos Records 90
H3,144,145,159 Boombastic 80,126,133-40,143,
Charlie Chaplin 62, 63
144,146,147 "Boom Bye Bye" 129
Charmers, Lloyd 89 Chinna 75 Chin, Patricia 86
Boothe, Ken. See Mr. Rocksteady
Chin, Percy. See Jah Life
Boris Gardner Happening 56
Chin, Randy 168
Boston Globe 137 Boucher, Geoff 19, 20
Chin, Vincent 86 "Chronic" 167
Bounty Killer 58, 74, 82,102,114,
Clapton, Eric 136
137,147,159,166,168,170
Clarke, Augustus. See Gussie
"Bow Wow" 126
Clarke, Bobby quoted 144
Bradley, Lloyd 37, 56, 58,113
Clevie 82
ISM
IndGx
Cliff, Jimmy 17, 83
Dirtsman 103
Clint Eastwood 64
Dixon, Bobby "Digital" 82
"Closer I Get to You, The" 72
Doctor Alimantado 52
"Close to You" 17,119,129
Dodd, Clement. See Coxsone Dodd
Cobra 58, 90, quoted 149
Don Dada 1:17
Cocoa Tea 81, 10.1
Don One Recording Studios 91, 92,
Columbia Records go, 117, 149 "Concrete Jungle" 53
99,103 Dorset, Ray 137
Congos 57
Dowe, Brent 56
"Conversation" (rhythm) 126
Downbeat (sound system) 35, 37, 49,
"Cool Runnings" 62
87,88
Corfield, Gemma quoted 144, 146
"Dream" 144
"Could You Be Loved" 103
"Drum Song" 103
Count Goody 42, 49
Ducent, Ricardo. See Rik Rok
Count Jones 49
Duke Reid 35, 36, 37, 49, 50, 51, 52,
Count Machuki 49, quoted 50, 92
55-56,102
Count Nicholas 42, 49
Duke Vin 49
Count Ossie 15, 55
Dunbar, Sly (see also Sly & Robbie)
Count Shelley 86 Coxsone Dodd 35, 36, 37, 49, 51, 59, 81, 90, 91,102,137
119,147 Dunkley, Archibald 54 "Duppy or Uglyman" 101
"Coxsone Hop" 37
Dyer, Ian. See Mr. Easy
Culture 57, 117
Dynamic Studios 56
Culture Lee 72 Daddy Syva 113
Ebony no, 150,1:54
"Daddy" U-Roy. See U-Roy
Echoes 125
Dailey, Noel 74
Echo Minott 72
Dalton, Peter quoted 32, 42, quoted
Edwards, Vincent. See King Edwards
60
IfiS
Elektra Records 90
"Dance and Shout" 155, 157
Elliott, Max. See Maxi Priest
Davis, Clive 84,149
El Paso Hi-Fi (sound system) 51
"Day Oh" 139
"Entertainment" 62
Dekker, Desmond 22, 53
Epic/Sony Records 90
Denver Westivord 17, 97,107,109
Erasmus Hall High School 84, 85, 92
Devonte 155
Ertegun, Ahmet 148
Digital English (record label) 91
Evans, Claude 88
Dillinger 52, 57
"Everything I Own" 114
shaggy: d o g a m u f f i n style
Express Post 19, 23
Gibraltar Musik (sound system) 93
"Eye of the Tiger" 147
"Girls File" 155 "Give Thanks and Praise" 126,127
Family Man 88, 89
Gold, Brian 114,123,147,167
Fat Eyes (record label) 135
Gold Mine 138
Fatta 135,145,147
Gold, Tony 114,123,147,167
"Feel It Boy" 168
Goodison, Bunny 42
"Finger Smith" 139
"Good the Bad and the Ugly, The" 89
Firgo Digital (sound system) 87
"Goody Body" 113
Fischer, Bobby 84
"Gotta Get Mine" 90
"Flex" 129,149
GQ 128
Folkes Brothers 15, 55, in
Grand Puba 138
"Forgive Them Father" 139
"Great Ambition" 83
Forresters' Hall 41
Green, Joshua 17, 97, 99,107
Foster, Chuck quoted 13, quoted 15,
Greensleeves 94,114,119,155,166
in, 114 Francis, Karen (nee Alleyne) 84—85, quoted 85, quoted 85-86 Franklin, Erma 145
Guardian quoted 15, 83, 98,107, 108,118,119,130,134 Gunn, Peter 112 Gussie 53,135
Freak Power 133 "Full Control" 169 Full Metal Jacket 99
Half Pint 62,63,81 Halloway 160 Hard to Wet, Easy to Dry 149
GarnettSilk 58
Harriott, Derrick quoted 41
Garvey, Marcus Mosiah quoted 54, 55
Harris, Wynonie 36
Gatortail 37
HC&F Studios 91, 92,102,126,135
Gaye, Marvin 134,169
Hear My Cry 167
Gemini Disco (sound system) 65
"Heartbreak Suzie" 138
General Echo 62, 63, 65, 66, 89
Heavy D 90
General High Power (sound system)
"Hello Y'All" 90
87 General Leon 72
Henton, "Digital" Paul 100 Heptones 137
Germaica Observer in
Herculords (sound system) 31
Germain, Donovan 112
"Here Comes the Hotstepper" 17
"Get Down to It" 101
"Hey Baby" 82,137,168
GG All Stars in
"Hey Sexy Lady" 169
"Ghetto Red Hot" 90
Hibbert, Joseph 54-55
Giant (sound system) 49
High Times Band 73, 75
Ifih
Index Holt, John quoted 51
Jackson, Michael 88, 89, 134
Honolulu Star-Bulletin 93
Jackson, Munchie 87
"Hooky Jucky" 169
Jackson, Willis. See Gatortail
"Hot Gal" 155
Jah Life 59, 91
Hotshot 13,14,19, 20, 24, 148,154,
Jah Life Time (record label) 91
55. <56> i58> l67 "Hot This Year" 103
Jah Rastafari. See Selassie, Haile, I
Howell, Leonard P. 54
Jahsone, Michael 72
I
Jah Screw 72
"How Much More" 135
Jah Stitch 52, 57
How Stella Got Her Groove Back 14,
Jah Thomas 30, 59
i«53 Hudson, Keith 51
Jah Woosh 52, 57
Hurford, Ray 86
Jamaica Gleaner 122, 149, 150, 165,
Hussein, Saddam 104 Hybrid Theory 13
Jah Youth. See Big Youth
167,168 Jamaica Tourist Board 165 James, Lloyd. See King Jammy
"I'll Never Let You Go" 102
Jam, Jimmy 153, 155
"Informer" 17, 129
Jarrett, Mikey 93
INS (studio) 126
Jarrett, Wayne 87
"Inside" 133 International Monetary Fund 61
Jay-Z 169 Jerry, Mungo 135, 136, 137
"In the Summertime" 112, 135, 136,
Joe Frazier (record label) 91
i.37> I38' H3> H4, H5,167 Intimate and Interactive 123
Johnson, Maurice 81
Irie, Welton 87 R 3
John Wayne 72 "Joker, The" 14, 161-62
!- °y s^s
Jones, Hedley quoted 42, quoted 43,
Isaacs, Gregory 57, 83, 117 "I Shot the Sheriff' 136
44 Joplin, Janice 145
Island Records 138, 149,167
Jordan, Louis 36
"Israelites, The" 22, 53
Junior Kelly 58,166
Israel Vibration 57
Junior Reid 72
"It Bun Me" 127
Junjo Lawes 30, 59
Itopia 87
Junk Yard (record label) 160
"It Wasn't Me" 14,19, 20, 24, 83,
"Just Friends" 137
109,156-61,166 "Kak Up" (rhythm) 155
157
Jackson 5 156
Kamoze, Ini 17
Jackson, Janet 14, 153,154,168
Kaski, Tero 82
shaggy: dogamuffin style
Kelly, Dave. See Rude Boy
Levy, Barrington 62
Kelly, Tony. See CD
Levy, Dahved 104
Kentucky Kid 160 "Kibbles and Bits" 101
Lewis, Terry 153-54,155 Liberace 124
Kilimanjaro (sound system) 65
Lieutenant Stitchie 23, 81, 82,
King Addies (sound system) 92
quoted 83,100,126
King Custom (sound system) 87
Linkin Park 13
King Edwards 49
Little John 62, 72
King Jammy 33, 58, 67, 71-75,
Little Roy 87
80-82, 83,114 King Jammy's 33, 72
Living Room Studios 92,167 Livingston, Robert 92,102,117-19,
King Moke (sound system) 87
quoted 118,119,120-21,122,125,
King Stitt 49, 50
126,135,136, quoted 149,159,
Kingston, Dave 65, quoted 88-89 King Stur-Gav Hi-Fi (sound system)
64,81 King Tubby 59, 91 "Know How Fi Chat" 89
160,166,167 Lone Ranger 62, 63, 64, 97,102 Lord Comic 49-50 Lord Tippertone Hi-Fi (sound system)
53, 57
Konders, Bobby 90, 91, 155
Los Angeles Daily News 107
Kool Here 31
Los Angeles Times 19
Kronick 113,146,147
"Love How Them Flex" 126,127
KRS-I quoted 31
"Love That's Real, A" 147
Kubrick, Stanley 99
Luciano 58
"Kuff (rhythm) 83
Lucky Day 169 "Luv Me, Luv Me" 14, 20,153,154
Lady Saw 160,166 "Later for 'Gator" 37
Mad Cobra quoted 129
Lauer, Matt 24
Mad House (record label) 112,155
Lawes, Henry. See Junjo
Mais, Don 30, 59
"Lecture" (rhythm) 90
"Making Tracks" 72
Lee, Bunny quoted 43, 51,126
Makonnen, Ras Tafari. See Selassie,
Lee, Byron 56
Haile, I
Lee, Paul. See Rossi
"Mama" 137
Legend 22
"Mama Used to Say" 88
Lesser, Beth quoted 33, quoted
"Mampie" 18,102,103,109, in, 126
72-73 "Let's Get It On" 134
"Man a Mi Yard" 100-01
Levi Strauss 133,134
Manley, Michael 60-62
"Man from Carolina" in
Iflfi
Index
Manners and Customs in the West Indian Islands 44 Marine Corps News 98, 113 Marley, Bob 15,16,17,18,19, 21,
"Model Ya Mi Gal" 155 Moodie, Don 91, 99,100 Moodie, Sonia 91 Moore, Colin 86
22-23, 24, 29, 30-31,45, 55, 57,
Moreton, J.B. quoted 44
58-59, 66, 67, 83, 88,103,104,
Morgan Heritage 58
III, Iig, I2O, 136, 137-38, 148
Mr. Easy 93
Marrison, Marsha 145,160,166,167
"Mr. Loverman" 17, 83
Marshall, Lany 71
Mr. Rocksteady 87, 114, 139
Marshall, Lynford. See Fatta
MTV 20,123,127
Masouri, John 125, quoted 126
MuchMusic 123
Massive B (record label) 91,155
"Murder She Wrote" 129
Master T quoted 123
Music Master (record label) 91
Master T: One VJ's Journey 123
Music Works Studio 135
"Mattress Jockey" 155
Mya 159
"Mavis" 166
My Bad 167
Maxi 119
"My Decision" 166
"Maxine" 101
"My Dream" 146
Maxi Priest 17, 119-20, 126, 129, 150
Mystic Revelation of Rastafari 15, 55
MCA Records 19,122,125,148,155, 156,158, 160,161,167,168
IflT
"Nanny Goat" 71
McKenzie, Clyde 121, quoted 122
NBC 24
Meditations, The 57
Negro World54
Melodians, The 22, 56
Negusa Nagast (record label) 53
Melody, Bobby 72
Negusta, Negus. See Selassie, Haile, I
Melody, Courtney 88
Neptunes 168
Melton, Barry 98, 99, 100
"Never Let Go" 64
Merciless 58,147, 166
Newhouse News Service 98,148
Meschino, Patricia quoted 85,104
"New Things a Wear" 114
Metro Media (sound system) 65
Newton, Ashley quoted 129
Metro, Peter 102
Newton, Juice 14
Michigan and Smiley 62
New York Daily News 99, 139,156
Midnite Lover 20, 97,143-46
New York Times 17, 92,118,138
Miller, Jacob 57
"Nice and Lovely" 127, 130, 143, 167
Miller, Steve 14, 161-62, 169
"Nice Up the Dance" 62
Miller, Veronica 83
Nichola Delita (record label) 53
"Mistaken Identity" 160
Nike Fungus 91, 93,113
Mittoo, Jackie 103
"9 to 5/My Decision" (rhythm) 166
shaggy: dogamuffin style No Doubt 82,137,159,168
Pliers 129
"No, No, No" 53
"Police in Jamaica" 102
Norman Manley Airport 79,124
Pompidou 72
Norris, Chuck 107
"Pose Off 103
Novick, Jeremy 19, 23
Presley, Elvis 16
Oakley, Bumps 88, 89
Prince Buster 15, 35, 36, 37, 55, 82,
Prince 91, 102, 103, 126, 135 Offishall, Kardinal 74,101
86, in, quoted 113
O'Hare, Kevin 98
Prince Jazzbo 51, 52,166
"Oh Carolina" 15, 19, 55, 82, 102,
Prince Midas 167
109,111-14,118,119,121,126,
"Prophecy" 87
129,130,133,136,143,144,145
Pure Pleasure 126-27,129> X35> J43'
"One of Them" 147
146
Originator. See U-Roy Osbourne, Johnny 72, 73, 88
Quaker (sound system) 86
Oumano, Elena 20, 21,121,126,143, 144
Radio One (BBC) 127, 129 Ragga Ragga Ragga g 166
Palmer, Michael 62
Ragga Ragga Ragga 14 155
Palmer, Triston 62
"Rainbow Country" 88
Palmer, Wayne 72
Randy's Records 86
Papa San 87,103
Ranglin, Alvin in
Paragons 51,136
Ranking Joe 63
Paramor, Jordan 155
Rastafarianism 23, 29, 53—56, 60, 62
Park Heights (record label) 91
Ray Symbolic (sound system) 65
Parton, Dolly 138
Rayvon 101,104,113,123,127,130,
Paton, Rebecca 128
161, 167
Paul, Frankie 72, 88,117
Reagan, Ronald 61
Paul, Sean 159
"Reasons" 73
Peacemaker (sound system) 82, in
Rebel, Tony 90, 137
Penthouse (record label) 112
Recording Industry Association of
Perry, Lee. See Scratch
America 13, 22
Phillips, Antony 143,144
Red Fox 91, 93, 94,102,103
Pickersgill, Fay quoted 165—66
"Red Red Wine" 17
"Piece of My Heart" 144,145,146
Redrose, Anthony 74
Pinchers 74, 81
Reggae: The Rough Guide 32
Pink Floyd 66
Reid, Arthur. See Duke Reid
Pizzonia, Shaun. See Sting
Revolutionaries 59
no
Index
Rik Rok 123,160, 161,167
Selassie, Haile, I 54, 55, 56,139
Riley, Winston 10:1
Seventeen 108
"Ring the Alarm" 101
"Sexy Body Girls" 146,147
"Rivers of Babylon" 56, 1:13
Shabba Ranks 17, 23, 30, 58, 72, 81,
Roberts, Patrick 121
82, 83, 87, 90, 94,103, 146,150
Robin 167
Shaggy: Original Doberman 94
Rocky Mountain News 121
"Shaggy, Where Are You?" 20
Rolling Stone 148
"Shake Shake" 169
Rolling Stones 140
Shakespeare, Robbie (see also Sly &
Romeo, Max quoted 55, 57
Robbie) 119, 147
Roots Groundation (record label) 91
"Shake Your Body" 154,166
Roots Radios 30, 59
"Shake Your Body (Down to the
Roots Rock Reggae 15
Ground)" 156
Rossi quoted 93
Shinehead 88-91, 92, 136
Rough and Rugged 90
Shocking Vibes Records 121, 168
Rude Boy 112,145,155,168
"Show Me Your Sign" 73
Ruff Entry Crew 93, 103
"Showtime" (rhythm) 155
"Rule the Nation" 50
Shukashine 72
"Run the Route" 103
Sibbles, Leroy 87
Rutkoski, Rex 168
"Sick" (rhythm) 74 Signet (record label) 102, 113
"Safari" 89
Simms, Jennifer. See Robin
Salmon, Katy 138
Singer 97, 109
Sassafras 72
"Siren" (rhythm) 155
Sato, Pablo quoted 156—60
Sister Carroll 87-88
Saxon International (sound system)
Sister Nancy 88, TOT
119
Scientist 30, 59
Sizzla 55, 58, 64
Scion Sachay Success 91
"Skin Out" 104
Scooby Doo 20, 79
Slackest LP, The 66
Scottish Daily Record 136
"Sleng Teng" (rhythm) 58, 67, 72-74
"Screaming Target" 53
Sliver 114, 133
Scratch 30, 57, 58, 87, 88
"Slow Butterfly" 114
Screecha Nice 72
Sluggy Ranks 80, 91
Screechie Dan 93,103,104
Sly & Robbie 59,112, 119, 129,145,
Seaga, Edward 60-62 Sebastian, Tom. See Tom the Great Sebastian
ni
Sixteen, Earl 56, 72
168
Smart, Leroy 72 Smart, Phillip. See Prince
shaggy!
dogamuffin style
Smith, Earl. See Chinna
"Strength of a Woman" 169
Smith, Slim 22, 64,102
Studio One 59, 64, 81, 86, 90, 91,
Smith, Wayne 71, 74, 80
102,103, in, 137
Snow 17, 129
Sugar Minott 59, 63, 73, 81, 87,166
"Some Guys Have All the Luck" 119
Sunday Express 14
"Something Different" 80,135,138
Sunday News 143
"Son of a Bitch" 160,166
Sun Herald 147
"Soon Be Done" 129-30
Super Cat 87, 90, 91,117-18
Soul Seekers (sound system) 86
Superpower (sound system) 80-82,
Soul Shack 42
83 Swade 137
Soul Syndicate 30 Sound Dimension 50
"Sweet Soul Rockin" 72
South China Morning Post 93, 98,
Sylvester Brothers 87
:
33
Synmoie, Leon 59
Speed 2 144 Spice, Mikey 154,166
Tanisha (record label) 53
Spiderman 91, 101
Tanto Metro 155
Spiderman (record label) 91
Tan-Yah (record label) 91,103
SpraggaBenz 155
Taxi (record label) 112
"Spy Fi Die" 102
Taylor, Chip 162
"Stalag" (rhythm) 101, 102
Tearaway 128
Steelie 82
Techniques, The 22
Steel Pulse 150
"TekSet" 126
Steffens, Roger quoted 19, 21, quoted 22, quoted 58
"Tempo" (rhythm) 74 Tenor Saw 88,101
Stereophonic (sound system) 65
Terror Fabulous 104
Stevens, Cat 119
Terrorist (sound system) 87
Stiltskin 133
"That Girl" 111,113
Sting 102,103,104, in, 112, 113,122,
"Them No Worry We" 90
168
Sting International (record label) 102, in, 117,126,135,161 Stolzoff, Norman quoted 29—30, quoted 44, quoted 45 Stone Love 35
"These Are the Lips" 169 "Think Ah So It Go" 97 Thompson, Linval 59 "Tide Is High" 136 Tiger 81, 82, 90 Time 149
Stone, Sharon 114
Times 83,108
St. Petersburg Times 139
Timm, Bob quoted 108
Streisand, Barbra 84
Today 24
1TE
In dG x
Tom the Great Sebastian 36, 49
Virgo Hi-Fi (sound system) 65
Tonto Trie 72
"Virtuous Woman" 137
"Too Hot to Handle" 167
Voice of the People (sound system) 35
Toronto Star 148
vp Records 150, 168
Torruella, Stephen quoted 109 Tosh, Peter 17, 31
Wailer, Bunny 17, 62
"Train Is Coming" 139
"Wake the Town" 50
Treasure Isle (record label) 50, 55, 86,102,137
Wake the Town and Tell the People 29 Wales, Josey 62, 81, 87
Trees 72
"Walking in My Shoes" 169
"Tribal War" 87
"War and Crime" 73
Trinity 51, 57, 63
Warrior King 137
Trojan (sound system) 35, 49, 55
Waterhouse 91
Tropical Storm 168
"Wear You to the Ball" 50, 51
"Try a 9 to 5" 166-67
"Wedding Ring" 104
Tuff Gong. See Marley, Bob
"We Do the Killing" 101
TulloT 72
"We Never Danced to the Rub-a-Dub
"Tune in, Turn on, Cop Out" 133
Sound" lor
Tupps 72—73
White, K.C. 53
Twinkle Brothers, The 57
White, Roy 42 "Whole Again" 160
UB40 17 U-Brown 52 "Under Mi Sleng Teng" 71, 74, 80 Universal/MCA 153 Universal Negro Improvement Association 54 "Up Chin Cherrie/Down Chin Cherrie" 89 U-Roy quoted 25, 50-51, quoted 51, 52, 57, 63-64, 72, 81,136
"Who the Cap Fits" 90 "Why You Treat Me So Bad" 138 Wild Apache (record label) 91 "Wild World" 119 Wilson, Delroy 60 Witty 91 Woliver, Robbie 118 Wonder, Wayne 80, 138 World Bank 61 Wreckless Breed 87 Wright, Hyman. See Jah Life "Wrong Head" 167
Version Galore 50 Virginian-Pilot no, 112, 134, 138
Xtra Large (record label) 155
Virgin Records 90, 121, 122, 126,
na
129, 133, 135, 140, 144, 146-50,
Yabby You 57
153' 154, 155, 168
Yellowman 62, 65-67, 97
shaggy: d o g a m u f f i n style York, Colyn "Bulby" 135,139,145, 147
"Zig Zag Stitch" 113 "Zion Gate" (rhythm) 137
"You Are Not Alone" 134 Youth Promotion 81
IIM